New and Emerging IdeasICSA 2026

Call for Papers

The goal of the New and Emerging Ideas (NEMI) track at ICSA is to encourage the software architecture community to propose new software architecture research visions and ideas, which can potentially challenge the status quo of the software architecture discipline (research and practice) and point to new directions and opportunities.

The ICSA 2026 NEMI track seeks the contributions that fall under one or more of the following:

• Visions or exciting new directions supported by a robust and well-motivated scientific foundation or practical application with concrete plans going forward.
• Arguments or results that challenge established results or beliefs, providing evidence that calls for fundamentally new directions, opening up new research avenues or software architecture practices.
• Thought-provoking reflections, bold and unexpected (even negative) results, and position papers that can help us look at current research directions in a new light, calling for new directions for future research.
• Radically new approaches, techniques, or theories that can bring new results to software architecture research or practice; may have yet to be supported by solid experimental results, but are nonetheless supported by strong and well-argued scientific intuitions as well as concrete plans going forward.
• Not yet fully mature, work in progress research results, which may lack full validation, however they should be supported by initial scientific evidence. These initial results should point to important scientific novelty or gaps that can stimulate reflection.

Scope

NEMI provides a forum for innovative, thought-provoking insights in software architecture to accelerate the exposure of the community to early and ongoing yet promising and potentially inspiring innovations in both industry and academia. A NEMI track paper is not just a scaled-down version of an ICSA research track paper, just incremental results on existing research, nor disguised advertisements for previously published results, products, tools or methods, or experience reports. The NEMI track is reserved for first-class contributions that provide novel, soundly motivated directions and emerging results in research and practice.

In principle, the track addresses the same software architecture topics of interest as those of the Research track. However, NEMI authors are encouraged to combine those topics in new ways to establish connections to other fields outside of classical software architecture, push the boundaries of software architecture to new avenues, as well as to argue for the importance of software architecture research and practice in areas not explicitly listed.

Evaluation Criteria

Each submission will be reviewed and evaluated in terms of the following quality criteria:

• Impact: the significance and potential impact of the research, including disruption of current practice and/or research;
• Originality: the novelty of insights or ideas/visions; the extent to which the contributions are sufficiently original with respect to the state-of-the-art;
• Relevance: the relevance of the research to the field of software architecture;
• Argumentation: appropriate consideration of relevant literature and/or research evaluation to demonstrate originality, arguments, and limitations; and
• Presentation: overall manuscript quality and how the paper’s quality of writing meets the high standards of ICSA, including explicit descriptions, as well as adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions

Formatting and Submission

All NEMI submissions must conform to the author's Instructions and must not exceed 5 pages, including all text, references, appendices, and figures. All NEMI submissions will follow a double-blind review process. The papers must be submitted electronically via EasyChair (track: ICSA 2026 New and Emerging Ideas). Submissions must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration for ICSA 2026 NEMI track. All submissions will be checked with an anti-plagiarism tool.

Note that in addition to an oral plenary presentation at the conference, authors of accepted papers may be offered the possibility to also bring a poster describing their work further to showcase their work to a broader ICSA audience.

Publication and Attendance

All accepted contributions will be published in ICSA 2026 Companion proceedings and will appear in IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Note that at least one author of an accepted contribution is required to register and present the work at the conference. In the absence of restrictions, an in-person presentation is required. All submissions must conform to the IEEE paper formatting and submission instructions and must not exceed 5 pages. The submissions must conform to the author instructions as well as to the IEEE Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Generated Text.