Call for Papers

REACH-AI 2026 · CIKM 2026 Workshop · Rome, Italy · November 8, 2026

Workshop Overview

Recent advances in Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed information access, knowledge discovery, decision support, and human-computer interaction. Despite remarkable progress, existing evaluation frameworks and benchmarks often fail to adequately assess how these systems perform across diverse cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic, and community contexts. As GenAI technologies become increasingly integrated into education, healthcare, government, social services, and everyday life, ensuring cultural competence, fairness, inclusiveness, and trustworthiness has become a critical research challenge.

The REACH-AI 2026 Workshop aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, community stakeholders, and industry leaders to advance methodologies, datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks that enable culturally aware and socially responsible AI systems.

Topics of Interest

We invite original research, position papers, system demonstrations, datasets, benchmark papers, and case studies on topics including, but not limited to:

Cultural Competence in Generative AI

  • Definitions, theories, and measurement of cultural competence in AI systems
  • Cross-cultural and multilingual evaluation of LLMs
  • Representation and inclusion of underrepresented communities
  • Cultural adaptation and localization of foundation models
  • Community-centered AI design methodologies

Evaluation and Benchmarking

  • Novel benchmarks for culturally competent AI
  • Human-centered evaluation methodologies
  • Participatory and community-informed assessment frameworks
  • Metrics for fairness, equity, inclusiveness, and social impact
  • Benchmarking across demographic, linguistic, and geographic populations
  • Evaluation of culturally grounded reasoning and contextual understanding

Knowledge Management and Information Access

  • Culturally aware information retrieval and recommendation systems
  • Knowledge representation of cultural and indigenous knowledge
  • Retrieval-augmented generation for diverse communities
  • Community-specific knowledge graphs and knowledge bases
  • Cross-cultural information seeking and knowledge discovery
  • Information retrieval for culturally relevant content via LLMs
  • Knowledge construction for underrepresented communities
  • Knowledge representation for culturally sensitive contexts
  • Human-AI collaboration in knowledge acquisition

Trustworthy and Responsible AI

  • Bias detection, mitigation, and auditing
  • Transparency, explainability, and accountability
  • Safety and alignment across cultural contexts
  • Fairness in multilingual and multimodal foundation models
  • Privacy-preserving and ethical evaluation practices
  • Cultural/social bias mitigation for LLMs and multimodal models
  • Human-centered AI evaluation and annotation frameworks
  • Explainability and transparency in AI evaluation

Community Engagement and Applications

  • Participatory AI development and co-design
  • AI for education, healthcare, social services, and public policy
  • Community-driven datasets and benchmark creation
  • Case studies involving historically underserved populations
  • Real-world deployment experiences and lessons learned

Submission Categories

We welcome the following types of submissions:

Submissions should follow the ACM conference format and be submitted in PDF format through the workshop submission site.

Where to Submit: Submissions will be managed through the EasyChair system. Submission portal: HERE

Submission Guidelines

Authors are invited to submit original short papers that have not been previously published, and are not being considered for publication in any other forum. Authors of each submission to REACH-AI 2026 are required to nominate at least one of the authors of each submission, for reviewing some papers. This can be done in EasyChair. Note that failure to nominate a reviewer among the authors will lead to desk rejection of the paper.

Review Process

All submissions will undergo peer review. Accepted papers will be selected based on originality, technical quality, relevance, significance, and potential to stimulate discussion within the workshop community.

Evaluation criteria include:

Each submission will receive at least three reviews.

Important Dates

(Tentative — to be finalized upon workshop approval)