Research and Experience PapersCAIN 2025

Call for Submissions

We invite submissions of research and experience papers in two categories:

• Long paper: Long papers are research or experience papers describing research results, case studies, or insights from industry experience. A research or experience full paper is up to 10 pages plus a maximum of 2 pages for references.
• Short paper: Papers describing new challenges, new research results, visionary ideas, or experiences from, or in cooperation with, practitioners are welcome as short papers. In-progress research with interim results is also appropriate for a short paper. A short paper is up to 5 pages plus a maximum of 1 page for references.

When submitting, authors are asked to classify their papers as either research or experience papers. Please use the following guidance to determine the appropriate category:

• Research Papers should primarily focus on research contributions, such as addressing a hypothesis, presenting novel methods, or offering theoretical insights. These papers contribute new findings to the field and advance the state of knowledge in software engineering for AI.

• Experience Papers should emphasize insights from practical application, case studies, or collaboration with industry. These papers highlight lessons learned, real-world implementations, or actionable insights that benefit practitioners and the industry.

If you’re uncertain, consider whether the main contribution is advancing research knowledge (research paper) or practical understanding (experience paper).

The paper submissions will undergo a double-anonymous review process with three independent reviews and a virtual PC discussion. Acceptance criteria include contribution to the field of software engineering for AI, novelty, research and industrial relevance, soundness, and results. The accepted full and short papers will be published in the ICSE Companion proceedings.

If a paper is rejected as a long paper because the reviewers consider that the research is in the early stages or lacking evaluation, the paper will be reevaluated as a short paper. If accepted as a short paper, authors can choose to accept or decline to resubmit as a short paper. On another note, rejected papers may be considered for the poster track – this will depend on the quantity of papers received and if authors agree.

Scope and Topics of Interest

The area of interest for CAIN is Software Engineering for AI — improving the development of AI-based systems throughout the full life cycle. Topics include but are not limited to:

• System and software requirements and their relationship to AI/ML modeling.
• Data management ensuring relevance and efficiency related to business goals.
• System and software architecture for AI-enabled systems.
• Integration of AI and software development processes into the AI system development life cycle, including continuous integration and deployment, and system and software evolution.
• Ensuring and managing system and software nonfunctional properties and their relationship to AI/ML properties, including runtime properties such as performance, safety, security, and reliability; and life-cycle properties including reusability, maintainability and evolution.
• Collaboration, organizational, and management practices for a successful development of AI-enabled systems.
• Building effective infrastructures to support development of AI systems and components.
• Further clarifications on the CAIN Scope

Note: Submissions that report strictly on data science or model development without any connection to software engineering and AI-enabled systems will be desk-rejected. As stated earlier, there are many venues for those papers where authors would get much more valuable and relevant feedback.

Submission Form

Research and experience papers should be submitted to HotCrp. The submission deadline is firm, no extensions.

All submissions must adhere to the following requirements:

• Page limit is 10 pages plus 2 additional pages of references for long papers and 5 pages plus 1 additional page for references for short papers.
• Submissions must be unpublished original work and should not be under review or submitted elsewhere while being under consideration.
• By submitting to CAIN, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. The authors also acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM and the authorship policy of the IEEE.
• Paper review will employ a double-anonymous review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-anonymous review process. In particular:
  • Authors’ names must be omitted from the submitted paper.
  • All references to the author’s prior work should be in the third person.
  • Authors are encouraged to title their submission differently than preprints of the authors on ArXiV or similar sites. During review, authors should not publicly use the submission title.

Submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).

Accepted papers will be published in the ICSE 2025 Co-located Event Proceedings and included in the IEEE and ACM Digital Libraries. Authors of accepted papers are required to register and present their accepted paper at the conference in order for the paper to be included in the proceedings and the Digital Libraries.

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM or IEEE Digital Libraries. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2025. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. Purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

Authors of papers receiving a Conditional Accept decision are expected to submit the revised papers with changes marked in a different color, such as using LaTeXdiff. The authors also need to submit an “Author Response” document capturing the authors’ response to each reviewer comment and how those comments were addressed in the revision. This is similar to the “Summary of Changes and Response” document that is typically submitted by authors for a journal paper major revision. The reviewers will check the revised paper against the original paper and the suggested changes. Conditional Accepts will be checked by only one member of the Program Committee, and this will be done in one pass.

Authors of rejected long papers may receive an acceptance as a short paper if the PC chairs and reviewers agree that it better meets the criteria for short papers. In this case, authors may decide to accept or reject the invitation if they would rather submit as a long paper to a different venue.

Similarly, authors of rejected long and short papers relevant to the field of AI Engineering may have their papers sent to a different CAIN track. Also in this case, authors may decide to accept or reject the invitation.