Call for Contributions
The CAIN 2027 Journal-First Track aims to showcase high-quality research papers from renowned software engineering journals that address topics related to the conference theme of AI Engineering - Software Engineering for AI. This track offers researchers the opportunity to present their published work to the CAIN community. By emphasizing contributions that have been published first in peer-reviewed, top-level journals, the track aims to disseminate knowledge and to promote interdisciplinary collaboration across a broader community of researchers and practitioners in the field of AI engineering.
Scope
We solicit submissions of accepted papers that meet the following criteria:
- The journal paper was accepted between April 1, 2025, and December 15, 2026.
- The paper makes a software-engineering contribution to the development, operation, or governance of AI-enabled systems, mapping to one or more topics in the CAIN scope.
- The paper appeared in a peer-reviewed journal with a rigorous review process. Leading SE journals (e.g., TSE, TOSEM, EMSE, JSS, IST) and AI journals (e.g., AIJ, JMLR, JAIR, ACM TIST, Nature Machine Intelligence) are all eligible; the lists are illustrative, not exhaustive.
- The paper reports new research results or presents novel contributions that significantly extend previous work but have not yet been reported elsewhere.
- The paper does not extend prior work solely with additional proofs or algorithms (or other such details presented for completeness), empirical results, or minor enhancements or variants of the results presented in the prior work.
- The paper has not been presented at, and is not under consideration for, a journal-first at previous CAIN and ICSE co-located events.
Submissions
Authors of manuscripts that meet the above criteria are invited to submit a proposal directly via the HotCRP submission system. This includes:
- Paper metadata (title, authors, journal, date of acceptance, URL, abstract)
- PDF file of the paper
- Short justification about the fit to the venue (max. 200-300 words)
Evaluation
As only a limited number of presentation slots are available for this track, presentation proposals will be prioritised according to their fit to the conference theme and the structure of sessions. Authors of selected papers will be invited to present their work in person at CAIN 2027.
As the papers will have already been reviewed and accepted by a journal, they will not be reviewed again for technical content.
Presentation
As a journal-first presenter, you will experience all the benefits of conference presentations, such as reaching a wider audience, interacting and discussing with peers, and receiving feedback on your work.
At least one author of each presentation accepted for the journal-first program must register and attend the conference to present the paper. The journal-first manuscripts will be listed in the conference program; however, as they have previously been published in their respective journals, they will not be included in the CAIN 2027 proceedings, nor will their metadata be included. CAIN 2027 participants will have access to the paper abstracts and a pointer to the journal publication through the online conference program.
Questions
Email Amel Bennaceur and Ilche Georgievski, the CAIN 2027 Journal First track chairs