Applied Data Science (ADS) Track: Call for Papers

KDD is the premier Data Science and AI conference, hosting both a Research and an Applied Data Science Track.  The conference will take place from August 9 to 13, 2026, in Jeju, Korea.  KDD has two submission cycles per year.  This call details the CFP for the first cycle and invites submissions for both the Research and the Applied Data Science Track.  An additional Datasets and Benchmarks track call will only be issued in the second cycle along with the other tracks.

A paper should either be submitted to the Research Track or the Applied Data Science Track but not both. The important dates for the KDD 2026 First Cycle are:

All deadlines are end-of-day in the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone. 

Submission Site

We will use OpenReview to manage the submissions and reviewing. Submissions will not be made public on OpenReview during the reviewing period.

All listed authors must have an up-to-date OpenReview profile. Here is information on how to create an OpenReview profile. Note OpenReview’s moderation policy for newly created profiles:

The OpenReview profile will be used to handle conflict of interest and paper matching.  An incomplete OpenReview profile is sufficient ground for desk rejection.  

To be considered complete, each author profile must be properly attributed with the following mandatory fields: current and past institutional affiliation (going back at least 5 years), homepage, DBLP (if there is prior publication), ORCID, Advisors and Recent Publications (if any). In addition, other fields such as Google Scholar, LinkedIn, Semantic Scholar, Advisees and Other Relations should be entered wherever applicable.

Abstracts and papers can be submitted through OpenReview (https://openreview.net/group?id=KDD.org/2026/ADS_Track_August)

Scope

The  Applied Data Science (ADS) track solicits submissions of papers describing deployed applications of data mining, data analytics, data science, applied machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The emphasis is on papers that either solve or advance the understanding of issues related to deploying data science and AI technologies in the real-world settings. 

Submissions must include a quantification of the post-launch performance of the described system or solution. Submissions that do not provide this quantification will be desk-rejected without review. This is a strict requirement. However, exceptions may be granted in the following cases:

  1. Blocked Deployment Due to Real-World Challenges: Submissions describing systems designed to address real-world problems but blocked from deployment may qualify for an exception. In such cases, the primary contribution should focus on:
  1. Unrealistic Deployment to Live Users: In rare scenarios, deployment to live users may be impractical due to external constraints. Examples include:

For these cases, we are open to alternative definitions of deployment, such as controlled or limited-scale pilots that provide substantial learnings. For instance, an application in AI for medicine might be deployed to a small number of domain experts to test in a field setting.

These exceptions are intended for unique circumstances and should not be considered the norm. Authors seeking an exception must ensure that their submission highlights the broader implications and community benefits of their work, even in the absence of post-launch performance data.

The following classes of submissions do not meet the criteria for real-world deployment and will be desk-rejected:

Papers should present the problem, its significance to the application domain, the decisions and tradeoffs made when making design choices for the solution, how any challenges in areas like data collection, modeling, and deployment in constrained environments were overcome, and the lessons learned from successes and failures. It is perfectly fine if the underlying machine learning approaches are not fundamentally groundbreaking. However, it must be clear how these machine learning approaches are applied to the problem domain, and deployed in a real-world system.

Papers should be aimed at a broad audience of applied data scientists. 

Application areas include but are not limited to the following:

Novelty for an ADS Track submission will not generally depend on novel research contributions, but may instead lie in the choice of application domain, engineering design, usability approach, or business use case.

Submission Guidelines

Deadlines. The submission deadlines are strict and no extensions, regardless of circumstances, will be allowed. Placeholder or dummy abstracts are forbidden.

Authorship. The ACM has an authorship policy stating who can be considered an author in a submission as well as the use of generative AI tools. Every person named as the author of a paper must have contributed substantially to the work described in the paper and/or to the writing of the paper and must take responsibility for the entire content of a paper. Any use of generative AI tools must be disclosed and elaborated in the submission form.

Maximum authorship. In the ADS track, the number of submissions allowed per author is limited to 5 (five) maximum per cycle.

If more than 5 papers are submitted with the same person listed as an author, the additional papers submitted after the first 5 by submission id, will be desk-rejected.

Authorship changes. The full list of author names, including the ordering, must be finalized by submission deadline. There cannot be any addition, removal, or reordering of authors after the submission deadline. The only changes allowed are the correction of spelling mistakes or new affiliation.

Anonymity.
Due to the nature of the Applied Data Science (ADS) track, the review process will be single-blind — author names and affiliations should be listed.

Formatting Requirements. Submissions must be in English, in double-column format, and must adhere to the ACM template and format (also available in Overleaf); Word users may use the Word Interim Template.  The recommended setting for LaTeX is:

\documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}

Submissions must be a single PDF file: 8 (eight) content pages as main paper, followed by references and an optional Appendix that has no page limits.  The Appendix can contain details on reproducibility, proofs, pseudo-code, etc. The first 8 pages should be self-contained, since reviewers are not required to read past that.  Note that different limits will apply to camera-ready (see below).

Originality and Concurrent Submissions. Submissions must present original work—this means that papers under review at or published/accepted to any peer-reviewed conference/journal with published proceedings cannot be submitted. Submissions that have been previously presented orally, as posters or abstracts-only, or in non-archival venues with no formal proceedings, including workshops or PhD symposia without proceedings, are allowed. Authors may submit anonymized work that is already available as a preprint (e.g., on arXiv or SSRN) without citing it. The ACM has a strict policy against plagiarism, misrepresentation, and falsification that applies to all publications.

Resubmission Guidelines. A paper that receives a Resubmit decision during the Feb 2025 submission cycle may submit a revised version to the KDD 2026 (first cycle) deadline. A paper that was either rejected or withdrawn after receiving its reviews during the Feb 2025 deadline should not submit a revision, and should not be re-submitted as a fresh submission to the KDD 2026 (first cycle) deadline. Please also refer to the FAQ for Resubmission.

Resubmission must be indicated upon submission, along with the OpenReview forum id of the previous submission. The resubmission should also include a one-page summary of changes as the first page of the submitted PDF.  While this summary page will not be counted in the limit of 8 content pages, exceeding the first page will be considered a violation.

The reviewers/AC/SAC will have visibility of the previous submission and reviews. We anticipate that Resubmit papers that address the previously noted concerns appropriately would have a higher acceptance rate than fresh submissions, owing to the former’s selectivity and potential improvements.

Correspondingly, some of the fresh submissions to the Aug 2025 deadline may receive a Resubmit decision for Feb 2026 deadline.

Serving as Reviewer. To ensure that all papers receive a sufficient number of high quality reviewers, there is a requirement for authors to contribute to reviewing.

Either case above constitutes an acceptance and a commitment to carry out the regular reviewing load responsibly. Failure to provide a qualified reviewer when one exists in the author list, or failure to carry out the assigned reviewing duty properly, is grounds for desk rejection.

Ethical Use of Data and Informed Consent. Authors are encouraged to include a section on the ethical use of data and/or informed consent of research subjects in their paper, when appropriate. You and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects (posted in 2021). Please ensure all authors are familiar with these policies.

Please consult the regulations of your institution(s) indicating when a review by an Institutional Ethics Review Board (IRB) is needed. Note that submitting your research for approval by such may not always be sufficient. Even if such research has been approved by your IRB, the program committee might raise additional concerns about the ethical implications of the work and include these concerns in its review.

Submissions that do not follow these guidelines or do not view or print properly, will be desk-rejected.

Reviewing Process

Reviewing.  Each submission will receive at least three independent reviews, overseen by an Area Chair (AC). If any author of a submission, who is also a reviewer, does not carry out the reviewing task in a proper and timely manner, no author of that submission will see the reviews of that submission during the rebuttal stage. 

Any use of generative AI tools during the reviewing process must be disclosed in the review form.  In particular, verbatim uploading of any passage from the paper being reviewed to any generative AI tool is forbidden.

Rebuttal. Authors will have the chance to provide a response to each review during the rebuttal period. The ACs will consider the authors’ response to the points raised by the reviewers, as well as discussion among reviewers, to inform acceptance decisions.

Withdrawal. Authors may use the withdrawal button on OpenReview up until the end of the rebuttal period. Beyond that, any request to withdraw must be made to the PC Chairs in writing, and approval for late withdrawal is at the discretion of PC Chairs. If withdrawal is made after reviews have been revealed to authors, the paper will face a 12-month waiting period before it could be submitted to KDD again.

Decision. A range of factors including technical merit, originality, potential impact, quality of execution, quality of presentation, related work, reproducibility of results, and ethics, will be used by the ACs to make a recommendation. The PC Chairs will make the final decisions.

Transparency. By submitting paper(s) to KDD 2026, the authors agree that the original submission, reviews, meta-reviews, and discussions will be made public in OpenReview for all accepted papers.

Conflict of Interest (COI) Policy

All authors and reviewers must declare conflicts of interest in OpenReview. A domain conflict (entered in Education & Career History) must be declared for employment at the same institution or company, regardless of geography/location, currently or in the last 12 months. A personal conflict should be declared when the following associations exist:

In general, we expect authors, PC, the organizing committee, and other volunteers to adhere to ACM’s Conflict of Interest Policy as well as the ACM’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

Any transgression that falls short of ethical standards will be investigated and may face disciplinary actions. Such transgressions include, but are not limited to, falsification, dual submission, collusion, pressuring any member of the program committee. Convicted misconduct may result in a 3-year ban from SIGKDD events for all the authors.

To assess and be able to exclude CFP violations, authors must give consent to the SIGKDD to process and share their submission and other relevant data pertaining to the submission such as authors’ names, affiliations, and email addresses to related conference organizations. Any and all data will be processed by only the respective Program Chairs and the Ethics Committee Members.

Publication and Presentation Policies

Publication. All accepted papers will be allowed the same maximum page length in the proceedings (12 pages, of which 9 are content pages), which will be published by ACM and will be accessible via the ACM Digital Library. That is, while we allow one more content page for accepted papers to incorporate reviewer feedback and enhance the quality of their papers, we limit the references and Appendix to only 3 pages. Accepted papers will require a further revision to meet the requirements of the camera-ready format required by ACM. Camera-ready versions of accepted papers can and should include all information to identify authors, and should acknowledge any funding received that directly supported the presented research. The rights retained by authors who transfer copyright to ACM can be found here.

Reproducibility.  In their submission, authors may refer to a code repository, though this is not strictly required. Rebuttals and discussions will not allow hyperlinks, so authors wishing to make code visible to reviewers must do so by referencing a repository at submission time.

Upon acceptance, authors are strongly encouraged to make their code and data publicly available. We are promoting the use of the “Artifacts Available” badge in ACM Digital Library. If you release any code, dataset, or similar artifact to accompany your paper, and host it in a publicly available, archival repository for research artifacts that provides a Document Object Identifier (DOI), you are welcome to apply for this badge.

There will be two rounds of applications for the badge:

An artifact evaluation committee will check the artifacts of all accepted papers for availability and relatedness to the paper after the acceptance notification.

Registration. To be included in the proceedings, every accepted paper must be covered by a distinct conference registration, e.g., two multi-authored papers require two registrations, even if they have overlapping authors. This registration must be Full Conference (5-day) registration, at the standard (non-student) in-person rate, payment of which must be completed by the specified deadline. This registration requirement applies universally, regardless of attendance or presentation mode.

Presentation. Every accepted paper must be presented at the conference. No-show papers may be withdrawn from the proceedings. 

Official Publication Date. The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date for KDD 2025 will be confirmed at a later stage. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Important update on ACM’s new open access publishing model for 2026 ACM Conferences!

Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). With over 1,800 institutions already part of ACM Open, the majority of ACM-sponsored conference papers will not require APCs from authors or conferences (currently, around 70-75%).

Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial or discretionary waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the APC Waivers and Discounts Policy. Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM.

 Understanding that this change could present financial challenges, ACM has approved a temporary subsidy for 2026 to ease the transition and allow more time for institutions to join ACM Open. The subsidy will offer:

This represents a 65% discount, funded directly by ACM. Authors are encouraged to help advocate for their institutions to join ACM Open during this transition period.

This temporary subsidized pricing will apply to all conferences scheduled for 2026.

Program Committee Co-Chairs

Email: KDD26-ads-chairs@acm.org

Qi He (Amazon)

WeeHyong Tok (Microsoft)

Faisal Farooq (Pinterest)

KDD 2026 (Second Cycle) – Important Dates

As KDD receives two rounds of submissions per year, the anticipated dates for the next round are as follows.