Call for Symposia

ICAIS 2025 calls for symposia covering a wide range of topics in the intersection of AI and sciences including but not limited to physics, chemistry, biology and materials.

Goal and Audience

The goal of ICAIS 2025 symposia is to provide an open platform allowing experts from both AI and sciences to have interdisciplinary discussions on specific challenges and recent progress in the fields, and finally pave the way to develop a more emerging future of AI for science.

It is significant to have parallel symposia for attendees interested in more specific topics, while the conference-level general talks and tutorials focus on the content that can benefit broad audiences.

The audience of the symposia should be experts and students from both machine learning and related science fields.

Uniqueness of ICAIS symposia

Parallel symposia in each day: Attendees can DIY their own schedule.
Cross-field sections: Different symposia can work on some joint events, which will be extremely valuable for AI for Sciences, to attract the attendees working on the interface of two or more topics.
Organizers from diverse backgrounds: Each symposium has organizers with diverse backgrounds, which can have diverse topics and content for both AI and science audiences.
Active engagement in the main conference: All symposia will be part of the main conference and host some oral and poster sessions from main conference

Submission link: Please submit your proposal in PDF or Word format using our Google form: https://forms.gle/cKVj484xnZQrs3ez5

Symposium submission timeline

Symposium proposal deadline: May 20, 2025 AoE
Proposal decision notifications: May 27, 2025 AoE
Symposium invited/contributed content finalization: Sep 30, 2025 AoE

ICAIS 2025 symposium committee:

The ICAIS 2025 symposia committee will commit to providing support for each symposium and coordinating all symposium events. Here are our members. You can reach out via email: cais-symposium-committee@googlegroups.com.[NEED UPDATE ] (Please also label “ICAIS 2025 Symposia” in the title)

Chair: Lixue Cheng (Microsoft Research AI for Science Lab) sherrylixuecheng@gmail.com; Flaviu Cipcigan (IBM Research Europe - UK)

Symposia format and suggestions:

The symposia will be in a parallel session format and will happen without time conflicts with the general conference sessions. The general conference session focuses on shared challenges, methodologies, and the symposia will focus on the specific disciplines. (See Tutorials and Conference Invited talks) We would like to provide a large degree of freedom for the symposium organizers. The following are the general and suggested format for the symposia, but any new idea is welcome and could be discussed with the ICAIS 2025 symposium committee.

Proposal format:

3-4 page well-written proposal in the provided ICAIS style, including main contents and organizer biography.
Clearly state the goals and necessity of having this symposium.
Have a proposed series of events for at least 2 half-days.
Include the senior and junior organizers and proposed speakers.

General requirement:

be multi-day events which could allow better engagement of the attendees
target a specific AI for Science topic. For example, AI for Computational Chemistry, AI for Synthetic Biology, AI for Astronomy, etc.
invite diverse speakers from both AI and the corresponding science areas
host oral talk sessions for the related spotlight papers reviewed by the main conference ( see Call for Papers): 2-4 spotlighted papers selected by the main conference, which align the symposium topics. Each symposium will also be involved in the decision processes of oral paper selections.
host poster sessions for the related accepted papers from the main conference: the main conference and symposium will collaborate to host poster sessions within the symposium.

Suggested:

have a focus or a message that people would like to deliver. For example, Generative AI for Computational Chemistry: New applications and challenges. Instead of “Generative AI for science.”
be specific with a reasonable scope, avoid being too narrowed or too broad. It could be specific to the AI approach but with broad applications, or specific to the science applications but with broad AI tools.
have diverse events: The symposia can consider the following events (just examples, not the required contents):
- have a mix of 30 min keynote talks, 15 min contributed talks and 40-60 min panel discussion
- call for contributed presentations and posters
- have 3-5 mins lightning talks for the accepted abstracts as traditional science conference sessions.
- any other reasonable event format could be proposed and discussed with the conference symposium committee chairs.
have cross-listed events in multiple symposia. For example, AI for biophysics, AI for materials, energy and sustainability and more. The cross-session events could happen in the suggested cross-session tutorial timeslots.
state your facility's needs and expected attendee numbers.

Symposia chairs and speakers:

The symposia should be organized by a group of organizers with diversity. Even though the proposal could be submitted by one organizer, we expect each symposium should have 3-4 chairs to coordinate and at least one chair can be on-site at ICAIS 2025 (15-17 October, 2025, Princeton, NJ).

We also highly encourage having a great mix of computer scientists and scientists (e.g. 50%/50%) in the organizing team. This is not a strict rule but effort needs to be shown in the proposal. We would also expect each symposium to invite speakers with diversities working on related topics from both AI and science perspectives.

For the accepted symposia, the chairs need to provide a final list of speakers to the ICAIS 2025 symposium committee before Sep 30, 2025.