ACM AI Leadership Summit 2026
Basics
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Dates | |
| Location | Atlanta, GA |
| Venues | Hyatt Regency (main sessions); Georgia Tech (Doctoral Consortium) |
| Host | ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) |
| URL | aisummit.acm.org (canonical; aisummit26.acm.org also resolves) |
| Contact | aisummit@acm.org |
| Format | Multi-track; invited leadership + submitted papers + doctoral consortium |
| Scale | Inaugural edition; 40+ speakers, 50+ "future leaders", 4 days |
Theme
"Thoughtful leadership around the future of artificial intelligence" – AI's transformative impact across science, education, industry, government, and society.
Conceived and supported by leaders from across ACM: elected officers, boards and councils, Special Interest Groups, and professional staff.
Program Overview
Updated 2026-07-24 from aisummit.acm.org — the track lineup has changed since the June reading below. "Frontier Models & Technologies" is now "Rethinking the Future"; "Responsible & Ethical AI" moved off Aug 31 (it is now a Sep 2 concurrent track) and "AI Governance" took its place; "AI and Scientific Discovery" is new. Session detail in Full program.
| Date | Hours | Track(s) | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 30 | 09:00–17:00 | Doctoral Consortium (invitation only) | Georgia Tech |
| Aug 31 | 08:30–19:00 | Rethinking the Future; AI and Scientific Discovery; AI Governance | Hyatt Regency |
| Sep 1 | 08:30–17:40 | AI and the Creative Arts; AI and the Workforce | Hyatt Regency |
| Sep 2 | 08:30–16:00 | Agentic AI; A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective (SIGs day, 6 concurrent tracks) | Hyatt Regency |
Superseded (as read 2026-06-14)
- Aug 31 — Frontier Models & Technologies; Responsible and Ethical AI
- Sep 1 — AI and the Creative Arts; AI and the Workforce
- Sep 2 — Agentic AI; ACM SIGs Day
Speakers
Announced as of 2026-07-24. Four featured:
| Speaker | Standing / affiliation |
|---|---|
| Yann LeCun | ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate; Executive Chairman, AMI Labs |
| Andrew Barto | ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate; co-creator of reinforcement learning |
| Amanda Randles | ACM Prize in Computing; Duke University |
| Rodney Brooks | Roboticist; founder of iRobot, Rethink Robotics, Robust AI |
Additional named speakers:
| Speaker | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| Virginia Dignum | ACM Technology Policy Council; Umeå University |
| Amandeep Singh Gill | UN Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology |
| Gabriela Ramos | Former Assistant Director-General, UNESCO |
| Markus Gross | ETH Zurich; Chief Scientist, The Walt Disney Studios |
| Jaime Teevan | Chief Scientist and Technical Fellow, Microsoft |
Note the shape of that list: two Turing laureates on the technical side, and on the governance side the UN Envoy plus a former UNESCO ADG. This is a policy-convening as much as a research one — which is itself the answer to the "governance term or capability term" question posed below.
Full program
Published program as of 2026-07-24 (aisummit.acm.org/program). Affiliations below follow the program page where it differs from the speakers page (Brooks is listed as MIT there, as founder of iRobot/Rethink/Robust AI here).
Sunday, Aug 30 — 09:00–17:00, Georgia Tech
Doctoral Consortium: Nurturing Future Leaders of AI — by invitation only. Full day of mentorship and peer exchange, led by the researchers and policymakers headlining the remainder of the summit.
Monday, Aug 31 — 08:30–19:00, Hyatt Regency Atlanta
Rethinking the Future: Frontier Models and Technologies for a New Era of AI
- Talk
- Yann LeCun (Turing Award; AMI Labs / NYU)
- Talk
- Andrew Barto (Turing Award; UMass Amherst)
- Talk
- Rodney Brooks (MIT)
- Panel
- The Next Decade of AI — moderator Mark Riedl (Georgia Tech); panelists to be announced
LeCun has publicly argued LLMs are a dead end; Barto co-created reinforcement learning; Brooks has spent decades attacking the field's assumptions. Three skeptics in a row is a deliberate programming choice, not a coincidence.
AI and Scientific Discovery
- Talk
- Amanda Randles (Duke University)
- Talk
- Daniel Litt (University of Toronto)
The framing question as posed by the organisers: when a machine generates the hypothesis, runs the experiment, and surfaces the pattern — what do we actually know? That is an epistemology question wearing a methods costume, and it is the same one the verification ledger here exists to answer at much smaller scale.
AI Governance
- Talk
- Amandeep Singh Gill (UN Secretary-General's Tech Envoy)
- Panel
- title TBA — moderator Dame Wendy Hall (University of Southampton)
- Virginia Dignum (Umeå University)
- Gabriela Ramos (UNESCO)
- Francesca Rossi (IBM)
- Philip Thigo (Office of the President of Kenya)
- Yi Zeng (Renmin University of China)
Reception 17:30–19:00.
Tuesday, Sep 1 — 08:30–17:40, Hyatt Regency Atlanta
AI and the Creative Arts
- Talk
- Aaron Hertzmann (Adobe Research)
- Talk
- Markus Gross (Walt Disney Studios / ETH Zurich)
- Panel
- Artists, Algorithms, and Authorship — moderator Sorin Matei (Purdue); Maria Giulia Dondero (Université de Liège), Kristen Yeon-Ji Yun (Purdue)
- Talk
- Ellen Zegura (Senior Science Advisor, NSF; Georgia Tech)
Adobe's and Disney's chief AI scientists on one stage with semioticians. Gross also appears in the SIGGRAPH 2026 orbit — same person, different framing of the same generation question.
AI and the Workforce
- Panel
- Building a Human+AI Symbiotic World: The AI Products + Workforce — moderators Michelle Zhou (Accenture), Rashmi Mohan (Cisco); Ed Chi (Google DeepMind), Lan Guan (Accenture), Jaime Teevan (Microsoft)
- Panel
- The Future of CS — same moderators; David Joyner (Georgia Tech), Beth Mynatt (Northeastern), Jeannette Wing (Columbia)
- Panel
- AI in the Real World — moderators Lauren Klein (Emory), Carl DiSalvo (Georgia Tech); Anuli Akanegbu (BLK IRL), Kathleen Brown (Public Art Futures Lab), Charmayne Patterson (Clark Atlanta), Kristin Phillips (Emory)
Correction to the at-a-glance reading: AI in the Real World is a panel inside Tuesday, not a separate track.
Wednesday, Sep 2 — 08:30–16:00, Hyatt Regency Atlanta
Agentic AI
- Talk
- Ahmed E. Hassan (Queen's University)
- Talk
- Ece Kamar (Microsoft Research)
- Talk
- Dinesh Verma (IBM Watson)
Framed as "autonomous and agent-based AI systems that can plan, reason, and act — opportunities and challenges for safety, control, and trust." Three industry / SE-research talks, no panel. The vocabulary question posed below gets its answer here.
A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective (the SIGs day)
Concurrent tracks, morning:
| Track | Topic | Moderator | Panelists |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI and Infrastructure and Systems | Peter Brusilovsky (Pittsburgh) | Fatma Ozcan (Google), Srinivasan Parthasarathy (Ohio State), Sophia Shao (Berkeley), Fabrizio Silvestri (Rome), Dan Stanzione (UT Austin) |
| 2 | AI and Societal Impact | Elizabeth M. Gerber (Northwestern) | Catherine D'Ignazio (MIT), Steve Jackson (Cornell), Shaun Kane (Google), Jacki O'Neill (Microsoft Research), Ranjit Singh (Data & Society) |
| 3 | AI and Creativity | Duri Long (Northwestern) | Pablo Cesar (CWI), Steven Dow (UC San Diego), Paul Fishwick (UT Dallas), Andre van der Hoek (UC Irvine), Heather Zheng (Chicago) |
Concurrent tracks, afternoon:
| Track | Topic | Moderator | Panelists |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI and Software: Can We Trust Software Written by AI? | Claire Le Goues (CMU) | Erik Meijer (Leibniz Labs), Armando Solar-Lezama (MIT), Margaret-Anne Storey (Victoria), Lin Tan (Purdue), Srikanth Yoginath (Oak Ridge) |
| 2 | Responsible and Ethical AI | Serena Booth (Brown) | Cynthia Bennett (Google Research), Casey Fiesler (Colorado Boulder), Sorelle Friedler (Haverford), Vera Liao (Michigan), Michael Littman (Brown) |
| 3 | AI and Education | Jamie Benario (Google) | Siddarth Kaza (Towson), Natalie Kiesler (Nuremberg Tech), Leo Porter (UC San Diego), Brandon Strubberg (Colorado Springs), Bryan Twarek (CSTA) |
Closing session follows.
Wednesday afternoon Track 1 is the single most on-topic session of the summit for the work here: Le Goues (automated program repair), Solar-Lezama (program synthesis), Lin Tan (ML for code correctness) on whether AI-written software can be trusted — the synthesis-and-verification question, asked by the people who built the tools that would have to answer it. It collides with the Agentic AI morning session in the same room-day, which is the schedule telling you the two communities still aren't merged.
Doctoral Consortium
- 141 applications received
- Decisions sent by June 30
- Call for this track has closed
Deadlines
| Item | Date |
|---|---|
| Paper submission deadline | June 30 |
| Early bird registration | June 30 |
| Doctoral Consortium decisions | June 30 |
Tracking
Things to watch for as schedule and details are published:
[X]Full speaker list published (2026-07-24) — see Speakers[X]Featured speakers announced — LeCun, Barto, Randles, Brooks[X]Day-level program with sessions, panels, moderators — see Full program[X]Agentic AI track details (Sep 2) — Hassan, Kamar, Verma; three talks, no panel[X]SIGs Day format — "A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective", six concurrent tracks (3 morning, 3 afternoon), moderator + 5 panelists each[ ]Per-session start times and rooms (only day-level hours published)[ ]"The Next Decade of AI" panelists (TBA) and the AI Governance panel title[ ]Doctoral Consortium accepted cohort announced[ ]Registration pricing tiers beyond early bird[ ]Which ACM SIGs map to which of the six Wednesday tracks
The Sep 2 Agentic AI track is the highest-signal day given the PAgE framing at PLDI 2026 (June) and the agentic engineering vocabulary question. Whether ACM leadership uses "agentic AI" as a governance term or a capability term will be legible from the Sep 2 program.
Partial answer, from the published program: capability. The Agentic AI session is three talks on systems that "plan, reason, and act", with safety and control as consequences — not a governance panel. Governance got its own track a day earlier, with the UN Envoy and no engineers on the panel. ACM is keeping the two vocabularies in separate rooms, which is itself the finding.
Related
- PLDI 2026 (June 15–19, Boulder) – PAgE workshop on agentic engineering; formal-methods framing of agents
- BugBash 2026 (April, Washington DC) – correctness/DST side; Antithesis, Quint/TLA+
- Agentic Systems 2026 – Seven Concerns framework; reference vocabulary for agentic AI tracks
- SIGIR 2026 (July, Melbourne) – Jaime Teevan's home community; the retrieval side of the same questions
- ACM TechTalk – reasoning models to agents (Aug 19) – capability framing, eleven days earlier
- KDD 2026 (Aug 9–13, Jeju) · SIGGRAPH 2026 (July, LA) – the other 2026 ACM stops