[CFP] Call for Papers – Special Session on Advances in Neural and Hybrid Architectures for Education (WCCI 2026)

[Gabriella Casalino]

Dear Colleagues,
we are pleased to announce the Special Session on Advances in Neural and Hybrid Architectures for Education, which will be held within the 2026 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2026) in Maastricht, The Netherlands, from 21 to 26 June 2026.

🔗 Special Session Page:
https://sites.google.com/view/nn4edu/home-page

Motivation & Scope
The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks has opened new opportunities to understand and support human learning. Modern educational environments generate large amounts of multimodal and dynamic data from learners’ activities, behavioral traces, and cognitive/affective signals. These data streams can be modeled using neural and hybrid approaches to build intelligent, adaptive, and personalized learning systems.
This Special Session aims to bring together researchers working at the intersection of neural computation, learning analytics, cognitive modeling, and educational technologies. We invite contributions on innovative deep learning architectures, neuro-symbolic systems, and hybrid models capable of analyzing, predicting, and enhancing learning processes in both formal and informal contexts. Relevant topics also include explainability and trustworthiness in educational AI, student modeling, affective computing, personalization strategies, and ethical considerations in the design of human-centered learning systems.
Topics of Interest (include but are not limited to):

• Neural and hybrid architectures for learning analytics and adaptive education

• Deep learning for learner modeling and performance prediction

• Cognitive and affective modeling in educational contexts

• Personalization and recommendation systems in intelligent tutoring

• Neuro-symbolic and hybrid reasoning for educational data

• Explainability, fairness, and trust in educational AI

• Multimodal learning data and temporal modeling

• Human-centered design and evaluation of educational AI systems

• Personalization, analytics, and ethics in education through knowledge graph and AI 

Organizers

• Hasan Abu-Rasheed, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany

• Gabriella Casalino, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy

• Daniele Di Mitri, German University of Digital Science, Germany

• Daniele Schicchi, Institute for Education Technology, National Research Council of Italy

• Davide Taibi, Institute for Education Technology, National Research Council of Italy

Submission Guidelines

• Submission deadline: January 31, 2026 (23:59, anywhere on Earth, UTC-12) No extension will be given.

• Full papers:  6 pages.

• A maximum of two extra pages (up to 8 total) is allowed at an additional charge.

•  More details available at:  https://attend.ieee.org/wcci-2026/information-for-authors/

• Please note that articles submitted to the Special Session will undergo the standard review process of the main conference and, if accepted, will be included in the WCCI 2026 conference proceedings

We would be grateful if you could consider submitting your work to this Special Session and share this Call for Papers with colleagues and collaborators who might be interested.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Kind regards,
The Organizing Committee