CAIS 2025: Call for Symposia

Call for Symposia

CAIS 2025 calls for symposia covering a wide range of topics in the intersection of AI and sciences including but not limited to physics, chemistry, biology, materials and sustainability.

Goal and Audience

The goal of CAIS 2025 symposia is to provide an open platform allowing experts from both AI and sciences to have interdisciplinary discussions on specific challenges and recent progress in the fields, and finally pave the way to develop a more emerging future of AI for science.

It is significant to have parallel symposia for attendees interested in more specific topics, while the conference-level general talks and tutorials focus on the contents that can benefit broad audiences.

The audience of the symposia should be experts and students from both machine learning and related science fields.

Uniqueness of CAIS symposia

  1. Parallel symposia in each day: Attendees can DIY their own schedule.

  2. Cross-field sections: Different symposia can work on some joint events, which will be extremely valuable for AI for Sciences, to attract the attendees working on the interface of two or more topics.

  3. Organizers from diverse backgrounds: Each symposium has organizers with diverse backgrounds, which can have diverse topics and contents for both AI and science audiences.

Submission link: Please submit your proposal in PDF or Word format using our Google form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1zatmgpxyh0ruxpXSucTZltpp1WCJgN5PpHj1iOgka4A/edit

Symposium submission timeline (Also see Dates)

  • Symposium proposal deadline: May 9, 2025

  • Proposal decision notifications: June 2, 2025

  • Symposium contributed content deadline: August 15, 2025

CAIS 2025 symposium committee

The CAIS 2025 symposia committee will commit to providing support for each symposium and coordinate all symposium events. Here are our members you can reach out via email: cais-symposium-committee@googlegroups.com. (Please also label “CAIS 2025 Symposia” in the title)

Chair: Lixue Cheng (Microsoft Research AI for Science Lab) sherrylixuecheng@gmail.com; Flaviu Cipcigan (IBM Research Europe - UK)

Symposia format and suggestions

The symposia will be in parallel session format and happening without time conflicts with the general conference sessions. The general conference session focuses on shared challenges, methodologies, and the symposia will focus on the specific disciplines. (See Tutorials and Conference Invited talks) We would like to provide a large degree of freedom for the symposium organizers. The following are the general and suggested format for the symposia, but any new idea is welcome and could be discussed with the CAIS 2025 symposium committee.

Proposal format:

  1. 3-4 page well-written proposal in the provided CAIS style.

  2. Clearly state the goals and necessity of having this symposium.

  3. Have a proposed series of events for at least 2 half-days.

  4. Include the senior and junior organizers and proposed speakers.

General requirement:

  1. be multi-day events which could allow better engagement of the attendees

  2. target a specific AI for Science topic. For example, AI for Computational Chemistry, AI for Synthetic Biology, AI for Climate, etc.

  3. invite diverse speakers from both AI and the corresponding science areas

  4. host poster/short talk sessions for the related spotlight papers reviewed by the main conference (The detailed review guidelines see Call for Papers)

Suggested:

  1. have a focus or a message that people would like to deliver. For example, AI for Computational Chemistry: Applications of large models

  2. be specific with a reasonable scope, avoid being too narrowed or too broad. Could be specific on the AI approach but with broad applications, or specific on the science applications but with broad AI tools.

  3. have diverse events: The symposia could also: (1) have a mix of 30 min keynote talks, 15 min contributed talks and 40-60 min panel discussion (2) call for contributed presentations and posters (3) have 3-5 mins lightning talks for the accepted abstracts as traditional science conference sessions. (4) any other reasonable event format could be proposed and discussed with the conference symposium committee chairs.

  4. have cross-listed events in multiple symposia. For example, AI for biophysics, AI for materials, energy and sustainability and more.

  5. state your facility's needs and expected attendee numbers

Symposia chairs and speakers: The symposia should be organized by a group of organizers with diversity. Even though the proposal could be submitted by one organizer, we expect each symposium should have 3-4 chairs to coordinate and at least one chair can be on-site at CAIS 2025 (13-16 October, 2025, Princeton, NJ).

We also highly encourage having a great mix of computer scientists and scientists (e.g. 50%/50%) in the organizing team. This is not a strict rule but effort needs to be shown in the proposal. We would also expect each symposium invites speakers with diversities working on related topics from both AI and science perspectives.

For the accepted symposia, the chairs need to provide a final list of speakers to the CAIS 2025 symposium committee before 30 Sep, 2025.

Symposium presentation submission

We welcome contributed presentation submissions to each symposia. These submissions will be managed by OpenReview provided by the CAIS conference but selected by the Symposia organizer. The possible submission tracks please refer to [Accepted Symposium page]. Please just submit an extended abstract using the [CAIS style] to OpenReview, and select the corresponding symposia you would like to submit to.

For Symposium presentation track:

  • Extended abstract deadline: July 15, 2025

  • Decision notifications: Aug 15, 2025