Doctoral Colloquium

Important Dates

• July 27, 2026: Submission Deadline
• August 7, 2026: Notification of Acceptance

We are excited to announce that the 14th ACM Collective Intelligence Conference (CI 2026) will host a Doctoral Colloquium for PhD students. CI 2026 is co-located and tightly integrated with the 2026 ACM Conference on Human-AI Complementarity and Alignment (HCOMP 2026), united under a shared theme: Connections.

The Doctoral Colloquium reflects that theme directly. It is a space designed for PhD students to forge meaningful connections — with peers across disciplines, with established researchers from both communities, and with ideas that sit at the intersection of collective intelligence and human-AI collaboration. Whether your work lives squarely within one conference's scope or bridges both, this is an exceptional venue to share it, stress-test it, and expand it.

Why Participate?

The joint CI + HCOMP event brings together two vibrant research communities that rarely have the chance to engage this deeply. For doctoral students, this creates a rare opportunity to gain visibility and feedback from a broader, more diverse audience than either conference alone would offer.

Selected PhD students will:

• Present and discuss their research directions, receiving new ideas and perspectives from researchers across collective intelligence, human-AI collaboration, AI safety and alignment, and related fields;
• Support one another by constructively offering feedback to fellow doctoral attendees;
• Build community among PhD students from both CI and HCOMP, fostering connections that can extend well beyond the colloquium itself; and
• Gain broader exposure for their work — particularly valuable as they prepare for the job market or the next stages of their academic careers.

The colloquium is especially timely given the joint event's focus on Connections — across disciplines, across humans and machines, between individuals and communities. We particularly encourage students whose research sits at disciplinary crossroads or explores how collective and AI-driven systems interrelate.

Areas of Interest

The CI and HCOMP communities together span a rich and diverse landscape of research, including but not limited to:

• Collective decision-making, democracy, and governance
• Human-AI complementarity, collaboration, and alignment
• Societal implications of AI
• Crowdsourcing and human computation
• Herd, swarm, and emergent behavior
• AI for science, science of science, and metascience
• AI systems for social good
• The future of work and human-centered AI
• Digital humanities and social computing

If your work connects to any of these areas — or connects across them — we want to hear from you.

Eligibility and Selection Criteria

Applicants must be currently enrolled in a PhD program. Students at any stage are welcome to apply, though the colloquium will likely prioritize those who have a clear dissertation plan, have made meaningful progress toward it, and are still at a stage where feedback and mentorship can genuinely shape their trajectory.

We are looking for students whose research shows potential to push boundaries and who would benefit from engagement with expertise beyond what is locally available to them. Priority will be given to applicants whose work connects to the themes of the joint event, particularly research that speaks to both the CI and HCOMP communities.

Application Process

Submit a Doctoral Research Overview (up to 4 pages), covering:

• Your thesis research motivation and questions
• 1-2 of your main research projects
• One of your on-going project or your proposed work for your thesis
• Your timeline and current stage in the research process
• A short paragraph explaining why you want to join the colloquium and how you expect to benefit — including, where relevant, how the joint CI + HCOMP setting and the theme of Connections is meaningful to your work.
• Finally, a supporting letter from your advisor. This is not a recommendation letter. It must verify that the student is enrolled in a PhD program, state the anticipated length of the program, and indicate the student’s current stage of progress. The letter should also state whether funding to attend the DC could be secured.

Submissions may include as many additional pages as needed for references and appendices.

Funding

We are currently exploring options to partially support DC participants financially. Applicants will be required to attend the conference in person, should not assume funding support through the DC, and are encouraged to seek institutional or external support where possible. Updates will be provided if funding becomes available.

We look forward to your application and to building a vibrant, cross-community network of future leaders across collective intelligence and human-AI collaboration. Come make some connections.

Submission

Please submit your application materials to the following Google Form prior to the deadline: https://forms.gle/mY8M6mcyGndUhGRC7

Doctoral Consortium Co-Chairs