The ICE 2026 Organising Committee invites high quality papers to be presented at this premier international event. Submissions should contribute to a substantial, original and previously unpublished research in the topics of the conference:
The topics of interest are examples, other topics that fit into the areas of the conference are welcome.
ENGINEERING
TECHNOLOGY
INNOVATION
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
27th Feb 2026: Full Paper Submission
15th Apr 2026: Author notification
29th May 2026: Camera-ready version
22th-24th June 2026: ICE Conference
This includes, but is not limited to:
The review committee is available to provide feedback on paper ideas.
For any questions, please contact the secretariat at info@ice-conference.org.
Special Tracks at ICE 2026 provide a focused forum on strategic and emerging topics, bringing together research, innovation, and expert perspectives within a coherent thematic framework. Each Special Track is coordinated by a dedicated committee of chairs and typically combines scientific paper sessions, interactive workshops, and an expert panel discussion. This integrated format encourages in-depth technical exchange, community building, and dialogue between academia, industry, and policy, fostering both scientific excellence and practical impact around the selected topic.
This Special Track explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming Technology Management (TM) across strategy, innovation, and organizational decision-making. As AI becomes a central enabler of digital transformation, technology managers increasingly rely on data-driven methods to support technology planning, forecasting, roadmapping, portfolio management, and innovation processes.
The track brings together scientific paper sessions, interactive workshops, and an expert panel discussion to examine both theoretical advances and real-world applications of AI for Technology Management. Topics include AI-supported decision-making, generative AI for R&D and product development, innovation management, foresight, and the organizational and human-centered implications of AI adoption. The track aims to foster dialogue between academia and practice, highlighting AI as both a managerial tool and a transformative force shaping future technology strategies.
This Special Track focuses on Digital Transformation Management (DTM) as a strategic and organizational challenge affecting enterprises, networks, industries, and society at large. While digital technologies such as AI, IoT, data analytics, XR, and additive manufacturing offer significant opportunities, many organisations still struggle to fully understand, manage, and realise the value of digital transformation.
The track combines scientific paper sessions, interactive workshops, and an expert panel discussion to explore frameworks, management practices, and real-world experiences that support successful digital transformation. Topics include digital strategy, organisational change, capability development, governance, and value creation for multiple stakeholders. The track aims to bridge theory and practice, fostering a shared understanding of digital transformation as a fundamental change process that drives competitiveness, innovation, and societal impact.
This Special Track addresses Smart Cities as a holistic approach to urban innovation enabled by digital transformation, open innovation, and user-driven ecosystems. It explores how cities can leverage digital technologies to improve sustainability, competitiveness, and quality of life while addressing societal, environmental, and economic challenges.
The track combines scientific paper sessions, interactive workshops, and an expert panel discussion to examine smart city strategies, living labs, and co-creation approaches involving public authorities, industry, researchers, and citizens. Topics include digital urban services, citizen-centric design, value-driven innovation, and the role of digital platforms and living labs in fostering inclusive and sustainable urban development. The track aims to bridge research, policy, and practice, highlighting cities as innovation ecosystems and testbeds for digital and societal transformation.
This Special Track focuses on human-centred digital transformation, highlighting the shift from technology-driven to people-driven innovation. As AI, automation, immersive technologies, and connected platforms evolve, organizations increasingly prioritise solutions that enhance human performance, skills, creativity, and collaboration rather than merely optimising processes.
The track combines scientific paper sessions, interactive workshops, and an expert panel discussion to explore emerging architectures, intelligent interfaces, AI-augmented tools, immersive learning environments, and new forms of human–machine collaboration. Contributions span engineering, industry, healthcare, and education, addressing ethical, inclusive, and responsible design. The track aims to bridge research and practice, positioning humans as active drivers of innovation in future-ready digital ecosystems.
This Special Session addresses the challenges of transforming AI from experimental prototypes into robust, scalable, and trustworthy systems operating in real-world environments. It focuses on end-to-end AI pipelines, spanning data foundations, model development, deployment, monitoring, and continuous adaptation across the AI lifecycle.
The session brings together recent research and applied experiences in data-centric AI, MLOps, hybrid science- and data-driven models, explainable AI, and human-in-the-loop approaches. Emphasis is placed on techniques that enable AI systems to adapt over time while ensuring transparency, accountability, regulatory alignment, and performance guarantees.
Contributions are invited that bridge methodological advances with industrial practice, showcasing architectures, tools, and lessons learned from complex AI deployments across sectors such as manufacturing, energy, health, and robotics.
This Special Session explores how modular, ecosystem-based approaches can enable the transition from rigid industrial value chains to dynamic value networks in the context of Software-Defined Manufacturing (SDM). While digitalisation has created significant innovation potential, many industrial initiatives still face challenges related to scalability, complexity, cost, and adoption.
The session addresses technological, organisational, and human-centred perspectives that support ecosystem-driven manufacturing, where interoperable software, hardware, standards, and processes enable continuous, distributed value creation. Contributions are invited that identify structural limitations of current production systems, as well as concept papers, architectures, case studies, and partial solutions that advance modular ecosystems and SDM practices across industrial domains.
This Special Session addresses the transition towards AI-enabled, service-oriented manufacturing systems, focusing on how manufacturing capabilities can be engineered, deployed, and evaluated as interoperable digital services. While AI adoption in manufacturing is accelerating, significant challenges remain in integrating AI-based services across organisational boundaries while ensuring performance, trust, scalability, and governance.
The session focuses on interoperable architectures, integration of AI components across the edge–shop-floor–cloud continuum, and the validation of AI-enabled manufacturing services in realistic industrial settings. Contributions are invited that present engineering approaches, deployment strategies, industrial case studies, and evaluation frameworks, bridging the gap between research prototypes and deployable, robust industrial solutions for planning, scheduling, quality, maintenance, and resource coordination.
This Special Session focuses on the trustworthy and responsible deployment of autonomous AI agents as a core enabler of digital transformation across enterprises, supply chains, and public services. While agentic AI offers significant potential for competitiveness and efficiency, increased autonomy introduces new challenges related to security, privacy, governance, transparency, and accountability.
The session invites contributions addressing preparedness, runtime supervision, monitoring, and assurance of AI agents operating in complex socio-technical systems. Topics include secure scaling of AI agents, multi-agent trust and communication, privacy-preserving data access, regulatory compliance, and human-centric governance models. Emphasis is placed on real-world deployments, industrial case studies, and validation results that connect technical controls with organizational processes, skills, and responsible innovation practice.
This Special Session explores the dual role of the Internet of Things (IoT) in advancing environmental sustainability while addressing the sustainability challenges introduced by large-scale IoT deployment. It focuses on how IoT can improve resource efficiency—including water, energy, and raw materials—across industrial and urban ecosystems such as Industry 4.0, smart cities, smart buildings, agriculture, and homes.
The session invites contributions presenting experimental and simulation-based case studies, eco-design and circular approaches for IoT devices and solutions, life cycle assessment (LCA) studies, and analyses of the environmental impact of AI-enabled IoT systems. Emphasis is placed on evidence-based results, comparative studies, and scalable solutions that support sustainable digital transformation.
This Special Session focuses on next-generation Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) as a key enabler of future industrial and service ecosystems. As collaborative robotics expands across manufacturing, construction, and infrastructure services, humans and robots must interact safely, intuitively, and effectively in dynamic and safety-critical environments.
The session invites contributions addressing AI-driven perception and cognition, multimodal interaction, middleware interoperability, and human-centric approaches for trustworthy and adaptive collaboration. Emphasis is placed on scalable and modular robotic architectures that support safe cooperation and context-aware behaviour. Contributions related to ongoing European initiatives, such as FORTIS, JARVIS, and ARISE, are particularly welcome, bridging advanced HRI research with real-world deployment and industrial impact.
This Special Session brings together researchers, innovators, and practitioners to explore dynamic intelligence, connectivity, and automation across the edge–cloud continuum. As distributed systems increasingly span heterogeneous edge and cloud resources, new approaches are required to enable seamless integration, adaptive orchestration, and intelligent resource management.
The session invites high-quality contributions presenting architectures, prototypes, and lessons learned from Horizon Europe projects and related initiatives, as well as independent research on distributed computing. Topics include AI-driven orchestration, security and trustworthiness, energy efficiency, federated learning, swarm intelligence, data spaces, and next-generation hardware and software technologies. The session aims to foster collaboration and shape future directions for cognitive, resilient, and efficient edge–cloud computing infrastructures.
This Special Track explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming Technology Management (TM) across strategy, innovation, and organizational decision-making. As AI becomes a central enabler of digital transformation, technology managers increasingly rely on data-driven methods to support technology planning, forecasting, roadmapping, portfolio management, and innovation processes.
The track brings together scientific paper sessions, interactive workshops, and an expert panel discussion to examine both theoretical advances and real-world applications of AI for Technology Management. Topics include AI-supported decision-making, generative AI for R&D and product development, innovation management, foresight, and the organizational and human-centered implications of AI adoption. The track aims to foster dialogue between academia and practice, highlighting AI as both a managerial tool and a transformative force shaping future technology strategies.
This Special Track focuses on Digital Transformation Management (DTM) as a strategic and organizational challenge affecting enterprises, networks, industries, and society at large. While digital technologies such as AI, IoT, data analytics, XR, and additive manufacturing offer significant opportunities, many organisations still struggle to fully understand, manage, and realise the value of digital transformation.
The track combines scientific paper sessions, interactive workshops, and an expert panel discussion to explore frameworks, management practices, and real-world experiences that support successful digital transformation. Topics include digital strategy, organisational change, capability development, governance, and value creation for multiple stakeholders. The track aims to bridge theory and practice, fostering a shared understanding of digital transformation as a fundamental change process that drives competitiveness, innovation, and societal impact.
This Special Track addresses Smart Cities as a holistic approach to urban innovation enabled by digital transformation, open innovation, and user-driven ecosystems. It explores how cities can leverage digital technologies to improve sustainability, competitiveness, and quality of life while addressing societal, environmental, and economic challenges.
The track combines scientific paper sessions, interactive workshops, and an expert panel discussion to examine smart city strategies, living labs, and co-creation approaches involving public authorities, industry, researchers, and citizens. Topics include digital urban services, citizen-centric design, value-driven innovation, and the role of digital platforms and living labs in fostering inclusive and sustainable urban development. The track aims to bridge research, policy, and practice, highlighting cities as innovation ecosystems and testbeds for digital and societal transformation.
This Special Track focuses on human-centred digital transformation, highlighting the shift from technology-driven to people-driven innovation. As AI, automation, immersive technologies, and connected platforms evolve, organizations increasingly prioritise solutions that enhance human performance, skills, creativity, and collaboration rather than merely optimising processes.
The track combines scientific paper sessions, interactive workshops, and an expert panel discussion to explore emerging architectures, intelligent interfaces, AI-augmented tools, immersive learning environments, and new forms of human–machine collaboration. Contributions span engineering, industry, healthcare, and education, addressing ethical, inclusive, and responsible design. The track aims to bridge research and practice, positioning humans as active drivers of innovation in future-ready digital ecosystems.
This Special Session addresses the challenges of transforming AI from experimental prototypes into robust, scalable, and trustworthy systems operating in real-world environments. It focuses on end-to-end AI pipelines, spanning data foundations, model development, deployment, monitoring, and continuous adaptation across the AI lifecycle.
The session brings together recent research and applied experiences in data-centric AI, MLOps, hybrid science- and data-driven models, explainable AI, and human-in-the-loop approaches. Emphasis is placed on techniques that enable AI systems to adapt over time while ensuring transparency, accountability, regulatory alignment, and performance guarantees.
Contributions are invited that bridge methodological advances with industrial practice, showcasing architectures, tools, and lessons learned from complex AI deployments across sectors such as manufacturing, energy, health, and robotics.
This Special Session explores how modular, ecosystem-based approaches can enable the transition from rigid industrial value chains to dynamic value networks in the context of Software-Defined Manufacturing (SDM). While digitalisation has created significant innovation potential, many industrial initiatives still face challenges related to scalability, complexity, cost, and adoption.
The session addresses technological, organisational, and human-centred perspectives that support ecosystem-driven manufacturing, where interoperable software, hardware, standards, and processes enable continuous, distributed value creation. Contributions are invited that identify structural limitations of current production systems, as well as concept papers, architectures, case studies, and partial solutions that advance modular ecosystems and SDM practices across industrial domains.
This Special Session addresses the transition towards AI-enabled, service-oriented manufacturing systems, focusing on how manufacturing capabilities can be engineered, deployed, and evaluated as interoperable digital services. While AI adoption in manufacturing is accelerating, significant challenges remain in integrating AI-based services across organisational boundaries while ensuring performance, trust, scalability, and governance.
The session focuses on interoperable architectures, integration of AI components across the edge–shop-floor–cloud continuum, and the validation of AI-enabled manufacturing services in realistic industrial settings. Contributions are invited that present engineering approaches, deployment strategies, industrial case studies, and evaluation frameworks, bridging the gap between research prototypes and deployable, robust industrial solutions for planning, scheduling, quality, maintenance, and resource coordination.
This Special Session focuses on the trustworthy and responsible deployment of autonomous AI agents as a core enabler of digital transformation across enterprises, supply chains, and public services. While agentic AI offers significant potential for competitiveness and efficiency, increased autonomy introduces new challenges related to security, privacy, governance, transparency, and accountability.
The session invites contributions addressing preparedness, runtime supervision, monitoring, and assurance of AI agents operating in complex socio-technical systems. Topics include secure scaling of AI agents, multi-agent trust and communication, privacy-preserving data access, regulatory compliance, and human-centric governance models. Emphasis is placed on real-world deployments, industrial case studies, and validation results that connect technical controls with organizational processes, skills, and responsible innovation practice.
This Special Session explores the dual role of the Internet of Things (IoT) in advancing environmental sustainability while addressing the sustainability challenges introduced by large-scale IoT deployment. It focuses on how IoT can improve resource efficiency—including water, energy, and raw materials—across industrial and urban ecosystems such as Industry 4.0, smart cities, smart buildings, agriculture, and homes.
The session invites contributions presenting experimental and simulation-based case studies, eco-design and circular approaches for IoT devices and solutions, life cycle assessment (LCA) studies, and analyses of the environmental impact of AI-enabled IoT systems. Emphasis is placed on evidence-based results, comparative studies, and scalable solutions that support sustainable digital transformation.
This Special Session focuses on next-generation Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) as a key enabler of future industrial and service ecosystems. As collaborative robotics expands across manufacturing, construction, and infrastructure services, humans and robots must interact safely, intuitively, and effectively in dynamic and safety-critical environments.
The session invites contributions addressing AI-driven perception and cognition, multimodal interaction, middleware interoperability, and human-centric approaches for trustworthy and adaptive collaboration. Emphasis is placed on scalable and modular robotic architectures that support safe cooperation and context-aware behaviour. Contributions related to ongoing European initiatives, such as FORTIS, JARVIS, and ARISE, are particularly welcome, bridging advanced HRI research with real-world deployment and industrial impact.
This Special Session brings together researchers, innovators, and practitioners to explore dynamic intelligence, connectivity, and automation across the edge–cloud continuum. As distributed systems increasingly span heterogeneous edge and cloud resources, new approaches are required to enable seamless integration, adaptive orchestration, and intelligent resource management.
The session invites high-quality contributions presenting architectures, prototypes, and lessons learned from Horizon Europe projects and related initiatives, as well as independent research on distributed computing. Topics include AI-driven orchestration, security and trustworthiness, energy efficiency, federated learning, swarm intelligence, data spaces, and next-generation hardware and software technologies. The session aims to foster collaboration and shape future directions for cognitive, resilient, and efficient edge–cloud computing infrastructures.
Special sessions in ICE have demonstrated to be crucial means for deepening knowledge, staying updated on the latest trends, fostering collaborations, and broadening perspectives within a specific field or topic. They contribute significantly to the advancement and evolution of research and innovation.
The ICE 2026 Organising Committee invites proposals for conference special sessions focused on specific topics related to the conference theme.
Conference special sessions should explain the means for soliciting and selecting contributions, proposing an independent review committee.
For a position of larger visibility in the Conference and respective Committee, please submit your proposal to organize and to be chair for a "track" of sessions under the scope of one of the major ICE/IEEE ITMC 2026 conference topcis.
Please fill out the Special Session template and send your proposal to info@ice-conference.org with the subject "Special Session Proposal".
30th Jan 2026: Special Sessions proposals
27th Feb 2026:Special Sessions Acceptance Notification
29 May 2026: Special Sessions Camera-ready copies
22th-24th June 2026: ICE Special Sessions
SS01 - Special Session: Smart grading, handling, and packaging solutions for soft and deformable products in agile and reconfigurable lines
SS02 - Special Session: AI-Driven Industrial Equipment Product Life Cycle Boosting Agility, Sustainability and Resilience
SS03 - Special Session: Digital Modelling and Simulation for Design, Processing and Manufacturing of Advanced Materials
SS04 - Special Session: Autonomous and Self-organized Artificial Intelligent Orchestrator for a Greener Industry 4.0
SS05 - Special Session: Non-destructive inspection technologies for sustainable manufacturing: Zero Waste and Zero Defects approach
SS06 - Special Session: Advancing Human Robot Collaboration in Industry 5.0
SS07 - Special Session: Urban digital and ecological transformation – an IT-engineering perspective
SS08 - Special Session: AI, Data, and Robotics for a Sustainable Food Supply Chain
SS09 - Special Session: Business Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, and Optimization
SS10 - Special Session: AI for Smart Engineering
SS11 - Special Session: Advanced technical solutions for building management and energy monitoring
SS12 - Special Session: Advancing the European Green Deal: Integrating EDIHs and Innovation Ecosystems for Sustainable Transformation
SS13 - Special Session: Manufacturing-As-A-Service (MaaS) and Smart Manufacturing Networks: A New Era of Supply Chain Resilience
SS14 - Special Session: Cognitive Computing Continuum
16 Mar 2025: Full Paper Submission
31 Mar 2025: Paper Notification of Acceptance
16 Mar 2025: Full Paper Submission
31 Mar 2025: Paper Notification of Acceptance
16 Mar 2025: Full Paper Submission
31 Mar 2025: Paper Notification of Acceptance
16 Mar 2025: Full Paper Submission
31 Mar 2025: Paper Notification of Acceptance
16 Mar 2025: Full Paper Submission
31 Mar 2025: Paper Notification of Acceptance
16 Mar 2025: Full Paper Submission
31 Mar 2025: Paper Notification of Acceptance
16 Mar 2025: Full Paper Submission
31 Mar 2025: Paper Notification of Acceptance
16 Mar 2025: Full Paper Submission
31 Mar 2025: Paper Notification of Acceptance
16 Mar 2025: Full Paper Submission
31 Mar 2025: Paper Notification of Acceptance
16 Mar 2025: Full Paper Submission
31 Mar 2025: Paper Notification of Acceptance
16 Mar 2025: Full Paper Submission
31 Mar 2025: Paper Notification of Acceptance
Entrepreneurship constitutes an important factor for economic growth, societal progression as well as individual self-realization. It is broadly defined as an activity that involves the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities to introduce new goods and services, ways of organizing, markets, processes, and raw materials. In recent years, there has been an increasing call for data-driven and evidence-based research to help understanding how entrepreneurial activities can best be supported, what components and surrounding factors make successful entrepreneurial ecosystems and what established companies can learn from entrepreneurial activities. Moreover, the exploration of opportunities from emerging technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, etc.) has gained traction, investigating how deep tech start-ups contribute to solving complex social and environmental challenges such as climate change, human health, advances systems and infrastructure. This special track comprises four sessions focusing on different areas in the entrepreneurship research field. Each session invites high-quality papers contributing to data-driven and impact-oriented research in the entrepreneurship field using new methods, novel datasets or novel perspectives on established datasets and focusing on the impact generated by or for the entrepreneurial activities to be investigated.
Alfândega Porto Congress Center
Porto, Portugal