The IE2026 Doctoral Colloquium (DC) presents an exceptional platform for doctoral candidates to showcase their innovative concepts and research ideas before a distinguished academic audience. It serves as a conduit for receiving invaluable feedback from external reviewers, a global scientific community, and fellow peers. This unique event offers doctoral students an opportunity to engage in discussions about their research and gain exposure to diverse perspectives that can significantly enrich and refine their work as they progress toward their doctoral degrees.
Participation in the DC not only fosters lively discussions but also fosters the exchange of insights, novel ideas, and the potential for forging new collaborative partnerships among research groups. Join us for this transformative experience and leverage the potential to shape the future of intelligent environments.

Scope

PhD students/candidates are invited to present, discuss and defend their work-in-progress or preliminary results in the intelligent environments fields. PhD students and candidates at all stages in the process are invited to submit a thesis position paper. Participants will be expected to give short, informal presentations of their work during the colloquium, to be followed by a discussion.
All accepted presentations will be submitted as “short papers” (maximum of 4 pages) in the Doctoral Colloquium Track of the submission system and will be published in the IEEE Proceedings for the IE2026 conference.

A prize will be awarded for the best doctoral colloquium paper, which will be announced during the main conference.
All presentations should be on research projects (PhD or similar), on topics appropriate to the Intelligent Environments theme which are either in a relatively early stage, but where the investigating student has already identified the nature and key aspects of the problem(s), and has ideas regarding how to solve them, or is at a stage where interesting results are being produced, but the work is not yet quite at a stage appropriate to produce a long paper.

As a minimum, papers should describe a research problem, explain why that problem is important and interesting, detail what the existing solutions (if any) or relevant methods are, including why these are not sufficient or satisfactory, and give some indication of the new solutions or methodologies the student is pursuing. There should be enough substance to offer and stimulate discussion, but the work does not need to be complete.

Participation Guidelines

• The main author of all contributions to the Doctoral Colloquium MUST be a student registered for a PhD or similar research degree. 
  
• The paper’s topic must be the PhD student’s project. 
  
• The one participating, submitting the paper, and presenting it must be the PhD student itself.
  
• The PhD student must provide their affiliation, the title of their PhD project, the expected graduation date, the name(s) of their supervisor(s), and a confirmation letter from the registrar’s office (or an equivalent authority).
  
• Participants will present their work during the Doctoral Colloquium track at the 2026 conference (further instructions to be released after acceptance).
  
  

Review Process

Each submitted paper will be evaluated by three reviewers, and the results will be determined according to the paper’s quality.

A panel of experts, formed by the organizing committee, will evaluate each poster and select the best colloquium paper. In addition to awarding the top paper, the panel will provide feedback to help presenters refine their research strategies and offer coaching comments for further development.

The main author of all contributions to the Doctoral Colloquium MUST be a student registered for a PhD or similar research degree.

Submission guidelines

For detailed instructions on paper submission and formatting, please refer to the Submission Guidelines section on the main conference webpage.
 

Doctoral Colloquium Chairs