Hot Topics Day Submissions

Call for Proposals

47th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS 2026) Yokohama, Japan. Conference: December 9–11, 2026. Hot Topics Day: December 8, 2026. https://2026.rtss.org/

RTSS 2026 will feature a Hot Topics Day (HTD), offering space to emerging research areas and results. The HTD will be a combination of workshops (full-day or half-day), special sessions, tutorials, and competitions. We solicit proposals for all four event types, from academia and industry alike.

Proposals for all event types are due August 21, 2026, with decisions communicated by August 28. Organizers who submit early may hear back sooner and can begin advertising accordingly.

Topics of interest

The HTD welcomes events across the full breadth of real-time systems. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• autonomous systems, including autonomous vehicles and robots;
• machine learning for and in real-time systems;
• real-time cloud, edge, and distributed computing;
• safety, reliability, and security of learning-based and autonomous systems;
• industrial automation, smart manufacturing, and Industry 4.0;
• 5G- and 6G-enabled real-time applications;
• cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things;
• explainable real-time systems;
• optimization of complex real-time systems;
• scheduling and schedulability analysis;
• mixed-criticality systems;
• real-time networking, including time-sensitive networking;
• real-time operating systems, hypervisors, and system software;
• timing-predictable hardware, multicore platforms, and accelerators;
• timing analysis, worst-case execution-time analysis, and formal verification; and
• certification, standards, and industrial practice in real-time systems.

We highlight one topic below that is especially timely this year.

Additional featured topic for 2026: AI in real-time systems research and development

Over the past year, AI-based capabilities have grown dramatically. Agentic coding assistants now write, refactor, test, and reason about substantial software systems, and general-purpose models increasingly take on the analysis, proof, and design tasks that were until recently the exclusive domain of human experts. The real-time systems community has long studied how to run AI workloads on real-time platforms, including the scheduling and analysis of machine-learning inference at runtime. For RTSS 2026, we wish to highlight a complementary and rapidly advancing direction, the use of these AI capabilities to conduct real-time systems research and development itself.

We invite contributions and discussion on any aspect of this trend. Two questions interest us in particular. First, how can we use these tools productively to accelerate real-time systems research and development? Second, how do we maintain the assurance and correctness guarantees that real-time and safety-critical systems demand when AI participates in their analysis, design, and implementation? These questions are open, and we welcome critical and skeptical perspectives as much as reports of success. Position statements, studies of failure modes and limitations, negative results, and evidence-based arguments for caution are essential to an honest assessment of where, and whether, these tools belong in our field. We also invite discussion of how our community should adapt as these tools reshape the pace and practice of research, including how work is produced, reviewed, and disseminated. Within this topic, contributions might address, among other things:

• AI-assisted schedulability analysis, including the generation, checking, or discovery of analysis and proofs.
• Large-language-model support for formal verification and model construction of real-time and safety-critical systems.
• AI-driven design-space exploration, configuration, and tuning of real-time systems and real-time operating systems.
• Agentic generation of real-time software, scheduler and RTOS code, benchmarks, and test suites, together with the validation needed to trust it.
• AI-assisted worst-case execution-time analysis and timing-model construction.
• Methodologies, guardrails, and assurance arguments for incorporating AI into safety-critical real-time engineering workflows.
• Tooling, datasets, experiences, and reproducibility infrastructure that apply AI to the practice of real-time systems engineering.

Event categories

• Workshops (W) encourage community discussion on a given topic. They may be full-day or half-day and typically include a refereed contribution track.
• Special sessions (S) present invited talks on visionary and emerging topics, typically three invited talks in a 1.5-hour-long session.
• Tutorials (T) offer attendees specific knowledge and background necessary for understanding technical advances in a relevant area, typically in 1.5-hour-long sessions.
• Competitions (C) bridge researchers and practitioners across communities through a shared task or challenge.

Industry participation

We particularly encourage proposals from industry, and proposals organized jointly by industrial and academic partners. RTSS 2026 is held in Yokohama, within reach of a dense concentration of companies working on real-time and embedded systems. We would like the Hot Topics Day to reflect that, and we are glad to help prospective industrial organizers shape an idea into a proposal. Inquiries in advance of the deadline are welcome.

Industrial perspectives are equally welcome in workshops, whether as co-organizers, program-committee members, invited speakers, or authors. Workshop organizers who wish to solicit experience reports, case studies, or position statements from practitioners, in place of or alongside conventional papers, should say so in their proposed format.

What to include in a proposal

Proposals do not have a rigid format and should be concise and brief. Below we list typical information to include in HTD proposals.

Workshop proposals (W)

• Title and abstract.
• Rationale and target audience.
• Estimated attendance.
• Organizer contact information with short biographies.
• Potential contributors.
• Duration (full-day or half-day).
• Proposed format.
• Paper selection and publication plan, if any.
• A summary of any prior editions, including the number of submissions received, papers accepted, and attendance.
• The program committee, or the slate of reviewers the organizers intend to recruit. Because the review window this year is short, we give weight to proposals whose reviewing capacity is already in place.
• Sponsorship information, if any.
• Technical and audio-visual needs.
• Any other relevant information.

Special-session proposals (S)

• Title and abstract.
• Target audience and estimated attendance.
• Organizer contact information with short biographies.
• A working title and brief abstract for each talk.
• Presenter names and short biographies.
• Technical and audio-visual needs.
• Any other relevant information.

Tutorial proposals (T)

• Title and abstract.
• Target audience and estimated attendance.
• Organizer contact information with short biographies.
• Technical and audio-visual needs, including any tool websites.
• Any other relevant information.

Competition proposals (C)

• Title and an abstract explaining relevance to the RTSS community.
• Competition format and duration.
• Estimated participation and eligibility criteria.
• Rules and assessment methods.
• Organizer contact information with relevant experience.
• Facility requirements.
• A summary of any prior editions.
• Optional participant list and dissemination plan.

Evaluation criteria

We will evaluate proposals on their general interest to RTSS attendees, the quality of the proposal itself, and the expertise of the organizers and contributors.

Important dates

Below are planned dates for planning for the Hot Topics Day.

Registration

All attendees and presenters at Hot Topics Day events must be registered for the Hot Topics Day, separately from, or in addition to, the main conference. The early-registration deadline for Hot Topics Day is the same as that of the main conference. See the RTSS 2026 registration page for details.

Submission

Send proposals via e-mail as a PDF to the Hot Topics Day Chair, Bryan Ward (bryan.ward@vanderbilt.edu).

Policies

• According to the RTSS conflict-of-interest guidelines, workshop program-committee chairs and special-session chairs are not eligible to submit papers to their own events.
• Competition organizers may not officially participate in their own competitions, except by prior approval via e-mail to the HTD chair.
• The event selection committee reserves the right to cancel workshops, special sessions, tutorials, or competitions if too few attendees register.