Research TrackSEAMS 2026

Submission

SUBMISSION LINK: Abstracts and papers must be submitted via HotCRP: https://seams26.hotcrp.com/

Submission and Important Dates

SEAMS 2026 will use a single-round submission system for the Research Track, with firm deadlines in October 2025, with the possibility of submitting a revised version as detailed below.

• Abstract deadline: Thursday 16th October 2025

• Paper submission due: Thursday 23rd October 2025

• Notification of decision ( Accept / Revision / Reject ) to authors: Wednesday 3rd December 2025

• Submissions of revisions due: Submit a revised version along with a response letter to the reviews by Monday 5th January 2026

• Notification of decision on revisions ( Accept / Reject ) to authors: Monday 12th January 2026

• Camera-ready for new and revised submissions due: Monday 26th January 2026

Author Responses

Authors of papers that receive “Revision” decisions will have the opportunity to submit a revised version of their papers. The authors are required to provide a response letter that (1) explains how the comments have been tackled, (2) provides answers to the questions posed by reviewers.

Paper Submission

All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at time of submission, to the official “ACM Primary Article Template”, which can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template Page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) and anonymous (omitting author names) options. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:

\documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart}

• All submissions must not exceed the specified page limits. The purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

• Submissions must strictly conform to the ACM conference proceedings formatting instructions specified above. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.

• The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2026. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

• Starting 2026, all articles published by ACM will be made Open Access. This is greatly beneficial to the advancement of computer science and leads to increased usage and citation of research. Most authors will be covered by ACM OPEN agreements by that point and will not have to pay Article Processing Charges (APC). Check if your institution participates in ACM OPEN. Authors not covered by ACM OPEN agreements may have to pay APC; however, ACM is offering several automated and discretionary APC Waivers and Discounts.

• The SEAMS 2026 Research Track will use a lightweight double- anonymous review process. No submission may reveal its authors’ identities. In particular:

  • Authors’ names must be omitted from the submission.

  • All references to the author’s prior work should be in the third person.

  • While authors have the right to upload preprints on ArXiV or similar sites, they must avoid specifying that the manuscript was submitted to SEAMS 2026.

  • During review, authors should not publicly use the submission title. They should thus use a different paper title for any pre-print in ArXiV or similar websites.

  • Additional material published online should be anonymized and should not provide references to the paper’s authors.

  • All communication with the program committee must go through the program committee chairs. Do not contact individual program committee members regarding your submission.

• By submitting to SEAMS, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. Submissions must follow the latest policies from IEEE and ACM (“IEEE Submission and Peer Review Policy” and “ACM Policy on Authorship”, with associated FAQ), which includes a policy specific to the use of generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT. In particular, papers submitted to SEAMS 2026 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for SEAMS 2026. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.

• If the research involves human participants/subjects, the authors must adhere to the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Upon submitting, authors will declare their compliance with such a policy. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

• Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM and IEEE have been involved in ORCID and may collect ORCID IDs from all published authors. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

• By submitting to the SEAMS, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the IEEE, the submission policy of the IEEE, and the authorship policy of the ACM (and associated FAQ). This includes the following points related to the use of Generative AI:

  • “Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, may not be listed as authors of an ACM published Work. The use of generative AI tools and technologies to create content is permitted but must be fully disclosed in the Work. For example, the authors could include the following statement in the Acknowledgements section of the Work: ChatGPT was utilized to generate sections of this Work, including text, tables, graphs, code, data, citations, etc.). If you are uncertain ­about the need to disclose the use of a particular tool, err on the side of caution, and include a disclosure in the acknowledgements section of the Work.” - ACM

  • “The use of artificial intelligence (AI)–generated text in an article shall be disclosed in the acknowledgements section of any paper submitted to an IEEE Conference or Periodical. The sections of the paper that use AI-generated text shall have a citation to the AI system used to generate the text.” - IEEE

  • “If you are using generative AI software tools to edit and improve the quality of your existing text in much the same way you would use a typing assistant like Grammarly to improve spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement or to use a basic word processing system to correct spelling or grammar, it is not necessary to disclose such usage of these tools in your Work.” - ACM

Submissions to SEAMS 2026 that meet the above requirements can be made via the submission site by the submission deadline. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk rejected without further review. We encourage the authors to upload their paper info early (and can submit the PDF later) to properly enter conflicts for double-anonymous reviewing. It is the sole responsibility of the authors to ensure that the formatting guidelines, double anonymous guidelines, and any other submission guidelines are met at the time of paper submission.

Call for Papers

We invite submissions of technical research papers describing original and unpublished results on software engineering for self-adaptive and self-managing systems, across the broad spectrum of topics of interest listed below. SEAMS 2026 will use a single-round submission system for the Research Track with the possibility of submitting a revised version. Accepted papers will be published in the IEEE and ACM digital libraries. In addition, authors of distinguished papers will be invited to submit revised and extended versions of their work to a dedicated Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems ( TAAS ).

To celebrate 20 successful past editions of SEAMS , we are inviting submissions to a special category of papers called Future of Self-Adaptive Systems (SAS). Submissions are encouraged for papers that reflect on past SEAMS research and present a bold, ambitious vision for the field in the next 10 to 20 years.

Background

SEAMS is a CORE-A ranked conference that applies software engineering methods, techniques, processes, and tools to support the construction of self-adaptive and autonomous systems that provide self-* properties like self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimization, and self-protection. SEAMS aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to investigate, discuss, examine, and advance the fundamental principles, the state-of-the-art, and the solutions addressing critical challenges of engineering self-adaptive and self-managing systems.

Topics of Interest

We welcome research contributions to all topics related to engineering self-adaptive and self-managing systems, including:

• Foundational concepts

• Self-* properties

• Uncertainty

• Runtime models and variability

• Mixed-initiative and human-in-the-loop/human-on-the-loop

• Socio-technical and ethical challenges

• AI and machine learning

• Automatic synthesis techniques

• Control theory

• Simulation and digital twins

• Human-centered software development

• Requirements engineering

• Security and privacy

• Architecture and design

• Testing, verification, and assurance

• Evolution, reuse, and maintenance

• Processes and methodologies

• Self-adaptation for software engineering

• Formal methods for self-* systems

• Domain-specific languages

• Programming language support

Application areas and domains include but are not limited to Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems, cloud/fog/edge/mobile computing, bioengineering, quantum computing, robotics, smart environments, smart user interfaces, augmented/mixed reality, web/service-based applications, and automotive.

Types of Papers

We solicit the following four types of papers:

• Full research papers 10 pages of content + 2 pages of references: Papers offering novel and mature research contributions and experiences gained from applying or evaluating research results in practice.

• Short papers 4 pages of content + 1 page of references: Papers presenting ongoing research or new research ideas without a mature evaluation.

• ( New ) Extended Abstract 4 pages of content + 1 page of references: Papers presenting ongoing research or new research ideas without a mature evaluation. While the content and evaluation are the same as short papers, extended abstract are not subject to Article Processing Charges (APCs)

• ( New ) Future of SAS papers 8 pages of content + 2 pages of references: Papers that provide a roadmap and/or reflection of the past research in SEAMS and/or visionary, disruptive, or through-provoking ideas that have the potential to create a paradigm-shift in SEAMS. For such papers, the ambition and potential to create new research is more important than experimental evaluation, though some preliminary evidence or a well-thought-out argument that supports the ideas in the paper is strongly encouraged.

For additional information on how to submit papers to SEAMS 2026, please see the Submission section. Besides research papers, the SEAMS organizers encourage the submission of artifacts. Artifacts can be associated with research papers, or they can be standalone contributions. For both options, artifacts should be submitted to the artifact track.

Review Criteria

Each paper submitted to the Research Track will be reviewed by at least three PC members.

We have different review criteria that the authors should consider when preparing their submissions and which will be taken into account when reviewing these papers. Each paper type has its own review criteria, presented in order of relevance.

Full research papers

• Novelty: Is the proposal sufficiently novel with respect to the state-of-the-art? Do the authors discuss related work and clearly identify the gaps their contribution aims to fill?

• Relevance: what is the significance and/or potential impact of the research on the SEAMS community?

• Soundness: do the authors present a convincing research methodology? Did the authors discuss the limitations and risks of their work? Did the authors provide convincing evaluation or evidence for their research?

• Presentation: is the paper clearly presented? To what extent can the content of the paper be understood by the SEAMS audience?

• Verifiability: To what extent does the paper include sufficient information to understand how a proposed approach works and/or how data was obtained, analyzed, and interpreted? Does the paper support independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions?

Short papers & Extended Abstract

• Novelty: Is the proposal sufficiently novel with respect to the state-of-the-art? Do the authors discuss related work and clearly identify the gaps their contribution aims to fill?

• Soundness of the research plan: Do the authors present a convincing research plan? Do the authors discuss the limitations and risks of their plan? Does the plan refer to a sound research method(s)? Do the authors clarify their research questions, planned data collection, and data analysis? Do the authors perform a convincing proof-of-concept or some preliminary research steps?

• Presentation: is the paper clearly presented? To what extent can the content of the paper be understood by the SEAMS audience?

(New) Future of SAS papers

• Novelty and ambition: Is the vision sufficiently surprising or thought-provoking? To what extent does the paper have the potential to excite the community? Is the scope of the proposed idea ambitious enough to potentially bring about a paradigm shift in SEAMS research?

• Potential for discussion: Does the presentation of the paper at SEAMS have potential to encourage discussions or debates among the audience?

• Presentation: Is the paper clearly presented? To what extent can the content of the paper be understood by the SEAMS audience? Does the paper sketch a well-thought-out and convincing roadmap for research?

Software and Data Artifact Availability

Authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity to increase the visibility of their artifacts (software and data) and to obtain an artifact badge. Authors can submit their artifacts, which will be evaluated by a committee that determines their sustained availability and reusability.