APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference 2026 (APSIPA ASC 2026)

Objectives

APSIPA ASC 2026 will continue holding the grand challenges introduced during the last edition. We are now calling for prospective organizers to submit proposals for organizing grand challenges (GC) as technical events of APSIPA ASC 2026. The proposals should be relevant to the theme and diverse areas of APSIPA ASC 2026, as shown in the Call for Papers. This session should include an overview presentation of the organizers (including the announcement of the winners), followed by the SPGC paper presentations (oral or poster) of the top ranked teams or innovative contributions, typically followed by a panel or open discussion.

📄 Download Call for Proposals for Grand Challenges (PDF)

Submission: https://bit.ly/apsipa-asc26-CfP-GC

Guidelines

Your proposal should include:

Title for your challenge proposal
A brief introduction to the challenge.
Organizers: name, affiliation, email and biography.
The expected impact and significance of the challenge in the research and/or industry community.
Details of the rules for participation.
Details of datasets that will be used, and state of preparedness of any newly constructed datasets.
Criteria that will be used to evaluate the submitted systems.
The full challenge schedule dates for data release, submission deadline and announcement of results.
List of potential participants (indicates confirmed participants if applicable).
Additional information (e.g., sponsors and awards).

Additional requirements

Participation

GC organizers facilitate participation, communication and impact; but cannot compete in the challenge they are organizing.

Datasets

GC organizers should provide public datasets if applicable, including training data with ground truth and test data without ground truth for final assessment. An optional hidden test set for evaluating the generalizability of their approach and a baseline model are encouraged for illustrative purposes.

Evaluation

Evaluation criteria and ranking methods must be clearly announced, transparent, and unbiased. Regular leaderboard updates via platforms (e.g., Codabench, Kaggle, Piazza) are encouraged, with provided baselines/ metrics. The competition may run for 2–3 months to find the winning teams.

Prize Awards

Organizers may offer or solicit prize awards, presented at APSIPA ASC 2026 in Hanoi, Vietnam, though the APSIPA organizing committee will not offer monetary awards.

Paper Submission

Organizers must submit a challenge overview paper and at least 6 winning/invited team papers to APSIPA ASC 2026 paper submission portal by April 24, all are subjected to peer review. The early bird registration can be extended for these group of grand challenge authors.

Publication Opportunity

Winning award papers will also be invited to submit a full paper to the open access APSIPA Transaction on Signal and Information Processing.

Important Dates

Initial proposal submission:	February 25, 2026
Notification of proposal acceptance:	March 1, 2026
GC paper submission:	April 24, 2026
Notification of paper acceptance:	June 1, 2026
Camera-ready GC paper submission:	June 15, 2026
Registration:	June 15, 2026
GC paper presentation:	November 9-12, 2026

Organizational Support and Policies

For accepted GC proposals, APSIPA ASC 2026 will provide the following support:

Dedicated GC session at APSIPA ASC 2026 for presenting the accepted papers.
Basic audiovisual facilities consistent with conference standards.
Coffee/tea breaks in accordance with the GC session.

Please note that the conference does not cover honoraria, travel expenses, accommodation, and registration for GC organizers and GC paper presenting authors. GC organizers are responsible for coordinating their GC teams' participation and ensuring their availability for the GC paper presentations.

Call for Proposals for Grand Challenges