CLEAR-AI Workshop · IJCAI-ECAI 2026 · Bremen, Germany
Important Dates
About the Workshop
The CLEAR-AI Workshop brings together researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders to address transparency in AI systems through collaborative and participatory approaches. Below you'll find more details about the workshop's focus, submission guidelines, and how to participate.
As AI systems become integral to critical decision-making processes, ensuring their transparency, fairness, and accountability is more essential than ever. The AI Act, the world's first attempt to systematically regulate artificial intelligence, places significant emphasis on this need. In particular, the Act establishes transparency as a fundamental principle, aiming to safeguard user rights and foster trust and reliability in new technologies.
Achieving these objectives necessitates not only the establishment of robust technical frameworks but also the active engagement of a diverse range of stakeholders to ensure that the development of AI is aligned with societal values. The CLEAR-AI Workshop addresses the critical need for interdisciplinary collaboration to advance methods, tools, and evaluation frameworks that ensure transparency, fairness, and trustworthiness in AI systems.
Venue
IJCAI-ECAI 2026 — International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Bremen, Germany · 15–21 August 2026
Registration and information: 2026.ijcai.org. Exact workshop date and room within the conference to be announced.
Problem Description
Transparency takes up a central instrumental role in addressing and understanding a wide range of problems from legal to ethical in AI development and deployment. Yet, transparency is often a vague and hard to pin down notion from an objective perspective and is defined differently on different levels in the understanding of AI systems.
In CLEAR we want to approach the problem from the direction of stakeholder needs on transparency. By understanding the needs for information we can work to concretely meet these demands.
The needs on transparency can come from many different sources, such as legal understanding and effective user agency, as such any workable method for this will have to address the participatory aspect of eliciting these needs from the stakeholders.
Workshop Challenges
Transparency is too often treated as something systems have rather than something they provide in relation to those who use, audit, or are affected by them. This theme challenges us to rethink transparency as an active relation between information and its audience.
Technical tools and conceptual models for transparency abound, but they often operate without a clear sense of for whom and for what they exist. This theme explores how metrics, explanations, and frameworks can be oriented toward concrete purposes—whether legal accountability, informed oversight, or effective user understanding.
The ultimate challenge remains to make transparency usable, relevant, and responsive. This theme looks at how today's methods can evolve—through participatory, methodological, or institutional innovation—toward transparency that genuinely empowers those who depend on it.
Topics of Interest
Submission Guidelines
Authors are invited to submit papers of up to 15 pages (excluding references) following the CEUR-WS formatting requirements. Proceedings shall be submitted to CEUR-WS.org for online publication.
Submissions will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. Papers must be fully anonymised prior to submission by removing all author names, affiliations, and identifying references. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register for the workshop and for IJCAI-ECAI 2026.
Submission link: OpenReview
Submissions are handled through OpenReview. Authors are advised to create an OpenReview account at least 2 weeks prior to the submission deadline, as recommended by OpenReview.
Organising Committee
Advisory Board
Contact
Questions regarding the workshop: Themis Dimitra Xanthopoulou, Umeå University, Sweden — themis.xanthopoulou@umu.se