IEEE Annual Congress on Artificial Intelligence of Things (IEEE AIoT)

December 14-16, 2026 · Kobe, Japan.

https://www.ieee-aiot.org/2026

SustainableAIoT-Afrasia: Sustainable AIoT for AfroAsian Communities: Edge Intelligence for Resource-Constrained, Climate-Vulnerable Regions

Call for Papers

SustainableAIoT-Afrasia is a full-day technical workshop on sustainable Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) for communities across Africa and Asia. The workshop focuses on AIoT systems designed for resource-constrained and climate-vulnerable environments, where limitations in power, connectivity, hardware, and infrastructure often challenge conventional cloud-centric and high-bandwidth AI solutions.

The workshop adopts a broad, engineering-grounded view of sustainability that includes not only energy and carbon efficiency, but also affordability, operational resilience, repairability, secure maintainability, and the local capacity to operate and improve AIoT systems over the long term. It aims to connect researchers and practitioners across Africa and Asia, bridge academic research with real-world deployments, and promote mentorship opportunities for students and early-career researchers.

We invite original technical contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Efficient and edge ML: compression, pruning, quantization, distillation, neural architecture search for microcontrollers, TinyML, coreset selection, and data-efficient training
• Sustainable and energy-aware learning: carbon- and energy-aware training and inference, solar/battery-constrained scheduling, and hardware-software co-design for low-power sensing
• Distributed and on-device learning: federated learning over heterogeneous and intermittently connected devices, split computing, and continual learning under drift
• Resilient networking, security, and lifecycle management: disruption-tolerant and intermittent networking, LPWAN and mesh networks, satellite and opportunistic connectivity, bandwidth-aware edge-cloud coordination, secure device provisioning, secure firmware/model updates, and long-term maintenance
• Sensing and perception for AIoT: low-cost sensor fusion, robust perception under noisy hardware, and remote-sensing/satellite-edge co-design
• Domain applications: precision agriculture, inclusive livelihoods, accessible learning ecosystems, water and energy management, climate/disaster early warning, low-resource healthcare diagnostics, smart mobility, and infrastructure
• Human-centered and multilingual interfaces: low-literacy interaction design, participatory data collection, and community-in-the-loop deployment
• Data governance: cross-border data sovereignty, privacy-preserving analytics, fairness, and robustness under regional distribution shift

Submissions and Formatting

SustainableAIoT-Afrasia welcomes five categories of non-archival submissions:

• Research extended abstracts: 4-6 pages
• Deployment / experience reports: 2-4 pages
• Demo proposals: 2 pages, with an optional short video
• Position / vision papers: 2-4 pages
• Student posters: 1-2 pages

All submissions will be reviewed double-blind via OpenReview by a Program Committee spanning Africa, Asia, and collaborating regions. Each submission will receive at least two reviews.

Accepted submissions are non-archival and will be hosted on the workshop website. Therefore, accepted submissions do not conflict with IEEE AIoT 2026 main-track or other venue submissions. Accepted demo materials may also contribute to a post-workshop open dataset or benchmark repository.

Mentorship and Awards

Authors of accepted student submissions and other interested early-career participants may opt into structured mentor-mentee roundtables, with approximately one mentor for every four to six mentees. An optional post-conference virtual follow-up session will also be offered.

Workshop awards will include Best Paper, Best Demo/Deployment, Best Student Paper, People's Choice Poster, and Outstanding Mentor Recognition.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

• Kashish Chawla, Associate Director, Accenture, Japan — Enterprise AI/IoT transformation
• Jin Nakazawa, Professor, Keio University, Japan — Edge AI and urban IoT sensing
• Arpan Kar, Professor, IIT Delhi, India — Adoption and impact of IoT/ICT systems
• Ramadhani S. Sinde, Senior Lecturer, Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, Tanzania — Field-deployed conservation IoT

Organization Committee

• Prakrit Silal, IIM Jammu, India — General Co-Chair (prakrit@iimj.ac.in)
• Hitika Tiwari, IIT Madras Zanzibar Campus, Tanzania — General Co-Chair (hitika@iitmz.ac.in)
• Teruaki Yokoyama, Kobe Institute of Computing & NICT, Japan — Local Arrangements & Publicity Chair
• Eshika Aggarwal, IIM Jammu, India - Publications & Demo Track Chair
• Rashi Niyas P., Systech, India - Publications & Demo Track Chair

Important Dates

All deadlines are Anywhere on Earth (AoE).

• 30 September, 2026 — Workshop paper/contribution submission deadline
• 7 October, 2026 — Notification of acceptance
• 21 October, 2026 — Camera-ready non-archival submission
• 14-16 December, 2026 — Workshop, Kobe, Japan

Submission Link

Submissions will be handled through https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ieeeaiot2026. The submission link will be published on the workshop website.