January 2026 ACM SIGEnergy Newsletter

Welcome to 2026! As we begin the new year, we extend our warmest wishes
for health, joy, and continued success. We look forward to another year
of collaboration, growth, and meaningful impact together.

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Content

1. Announcing ACM Sustainability Week 2026

2. ACM eEnergy’26 — Paper submission due this month!

3. ACM BuildSys’26 — Paper submission due this month!

4. Energy Informatics Review (EIR)

5. ICT for Sustainability — Paper submission due this month!

6. New Opportunity: IEEE Electric Grid Fellowship

7. Cornell University AI4S Seminar Series — Call for Speakers

8. Learning resource: Free Open-Source Graduate Textbook on Energy
Informatics

9. ACM SIGEnergy resource for energy-related data sets

10. Posting additional information (contact Shijia Pan:
[email protected])

1. Announcing ACM Sustainability Week 2026

In June 2026, ACM SIGEnergy is excited to announce that it will host the
first annual ACM Sustainability Week that will co-locate its flagship
conferences, ACM e-Energy and ACM BuildSys, along with associated
workshops. These conferences represent the top conferences in the world
focused on research at the intersection of computing and energy. The
inaugural ACM Sustainability Week will be held at Banff Centre for Arts
and Creativity within Banff National Park in Banff, Alberta, Canada.
Banff’s amazing natural landscape, including nearby mountains, glaciers,
lakes, and hiking trails, makes it an ideal venue for a forum presenting
state-of-the-art sustainability-focused research. Please make plans to
submit your best work to e-Energy and BuildSys and to attend in June
2026! Note that this change will shift BuildSys from having a summer
deadline in 2026 to an earlier winter deadline (likely in mid-to-late
January 2026), so make sure to plan accordingly!

Below, we discuss some of the reasons that motivated the creation of ACM
Sustainability Week and for co-locating e-Energy and BuildSys. The
catalyzing event was ACM SenSys’s decision in Fall 2024 to merge with
other conferences and become part of the CPS-IoT Week event held
annually in the Spring. ACM BuildSys originally evolved out of a
workshop held at SenSys, and so, historically, had been co-located with
SenSys and held annually in November since 2009. The SIGEnergy Executive
Committee and the BuildSys Steering Committee discussed multiple options
for BuildSys moving forward, including not only co-locating with
e-Energy, but also holding a stand-alone conference or exploring a
merger with CPS-IoT Week. Indeed, we’d like to highlight that ACM
BuildSys 2025 will be held as usual in November 2025 as a stand-alone
conference at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado (with the
usual summer 2025 paper deadline)! Thanks to Dong Chen at Mines for
hosting and serving as General Chair!

Ultimately, the committees felt that co-locating BuildSys with e-Energy
could provide a foundation for an exciting event that showcases the full
breadth and depth of SIGEnergy’s research. BuildSys and e-Energy
represent separate, but complementary, research communities that can
mutually benefit from closer interactions with each other. ACM BuildSys
generally emphasizes optimizations at the “edge’’ of the energy
system—the buildings, cities, and transportation systems that consume
energy—and thus has strong intersections with both civil and mechanical
engineering. Since BuildSys grew out of a computer systems conference
(SenSys), the community often takes a systems approach to solving
problems. ACM e-Energy generally emphasizes optimizing the energy
“network,’’ e.g., power generation, transmission, and distribution
systems, and thus has historically had strong intersections with the
power systems community and electrical engineering. ACM e-Energy also
evolved, in part, out of computer networking and an interest in
exploring how to apply computer networking and distributed systems
principles to energy systems. As a result, the e-Energy community has
often taken an algorithmic optimization approach to solving problems.

In essence, BuildSys and e-Energy both apply computational techniques to
optimize energy and carbon emissions, but often from different
perspectives using different approaches. Thus, one goal in co-locating
the conferences is to expose both communities to a wider range of
perspectives and approaches. As such, Sustainability Week will include
a number of joint events across both conferences, including plenary
talks, poster/demo sessions, workshops, and a Ph.D. forum. As mentioned
above, another important goal is to provide a showcase event for ACM
SIGEnergy. As a relatively new SIG with a strong interdisciplinary
component, there are many in the broader computing research community
that may not be aware of us. We hope that this annual event will
provide a larger platform to increase the visibility of
SIGEnergy-sponsored research across both conferences. We’d like to
emphasize that, while BuildSys and e-Energy will co-locate and
coordinate closely as part of Sustainability Week moving forward, they
will remain independent conferences with their own steering committees,
program committees, review processes, and control over topical emphasis.

We will provide further updates on details for the 2026 ACM
Sustainability Week as they become available. We look forward to seeing
everyone in Banff in June 2026!

David Irwin (SIGEnergy Chair)
Jorge Ortiz (BuildSys Steering Committee Chair)
Adam Wierman (e-Energy Steering Committee Chair)
Omid Ardakanian (Sustainability Week General Co-Chair)
Clayton Miller (Sustainability Week General Co-Chair)

https://energy.acm.org/announcing-acm-sustainability-week-2026

2. ACM eEnergy’26 — Paper submission due this month!

ACM e-Energy is the premier forum for research at the intersection of
computing and communication technologies with energy systems. It has
established a strong track record for high-quality research in the
application of computing and networked systems to make legacy systems
more energy-efficient and in the design, analysis, and development of
sustainable and innovative energy systems.

By bringing together researchers in a high-quality single-track
conference with significant opportunities for individual and small-group
interaction, it will serve as a major forum for presentations and
discussions that will shape the future of this area.

We are excited to announce that ACM e-Energy 2026 will be part of the
inaugural ACM Sustainability Week
(https://energy.acm.org/sustainability-week), taking place in Banff,
Alberta, Canada, from June 22 to 25, 2026. We invite strong submissions
that present conceptual advances, as well as innovations in system
design, implementation, and experimentation. New this year, we have
introduced four methodological tracks to better align submissions with
appropriate reviewers and to clarify the scope of each contribution.

** Winter deadlines **
– Abstract registration: Jan 22, 2026, 23:59 AoE (firm)
– Paper submission: Jan 29, 2026, 23:59 AoE (firm)
– Author notification: Mar 17, 2026
– Revision submission: Apr 7, 2026, 23:59 AoE
– Revision notification: Apr 21, 2026
– Camera-ready due: May 12, 2026

More details at: https://energy.acm.org/conferences/eenergy/2026/

3. ACM BuildSys’25 — Paper submission due this month!

The 13th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient
Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys 2026) will host a highly
selective, single-track forum for research on systems issues covering
all aspects of the built environment, broadly defined.

Advances in the effective integration of networked sensors, building
controls, and physical infrastructure are transforming our society,
allowing the formation of unprecedented built environments and
interlocking physical, social, and cyber challenges. Moreover, built
environments—including buildings and critical urban
infrastructure—account for over half of society’s energy consumption and
are the mainstay of our economy, security, and health. As a result,
there is broad recognition that systems optimizing explicitly for the
built environment are particularly important in improving our society
and represent the foundation for emerging “smart cities.”

In 2026, BuildSys will take place as part of the inaugural ACM
Sustainability Week, which will co-locate BuildSys with ACM e-Energy and
associated workshops at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in
Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada. Sustainability Week is designed to
bring together the world’s leading research communities focused on the
intersection of computing and energy, providing a larger platform to
showcase cutting-edge work and to increase the visibility of
SIGEnergy-sponsored research.

While BuildSys traditionally emphasizes systems optimizations at the
“edge” of the energy system—across buildings, cities, and transportation
infrastructures—e-Energy generally emphasizes the “network” aspects of
energy, including power generation, transmission, and distribution. By
co-locating BuildSys and e-Energy, ACM Sustainability Week creates an
exciting opportunity to expose both communities to complementary
perspectives and methodologies, spanning from systems approaches to
algorithmic optimizations.

BuildSys’26 is an ideal venue for researchers and practitioners
developing and optimizing smart infrastructure systems powered by
sensing, computing, and control, while benefiting from the synergies of
ACM Sustainability Week and e-Energy.

** Important Dates **
– Abstract Registration: January 22nd, 2026, 23:59 AOE
– Paper Submission: January 29th, 2026, 23:59 AOE
– Author Notification: April 3rd, 2026, 23:59 AOE

More information about ACM BuildSys’25 can be found here:
https://buildsys.acm.org/2026/

4. Energy Informatics Review (EIR)

ACM SIGENERGY Energy Informatics Review (EIR) welcomes articles on
SIGEnergy’s topics, namely within the intersection of computing and
communication technologies with smart and sustainable energy systems and
the built infrastructure.

Check the current issues! We had a Special Issue for the conference
proceedings of the DACH Conference on Energy Informatics, and the next
issue will comprise many papers from the HOTCARBON workshop 2024.

New ideas in the field of Energy Informatics should be spread early and
timely in the community, to foster discussions on assumptions and
methods, and help to trigger additional investigations. Specifically,
papers with early evaluation or feasibility studies are highly
encouraged. Additionally, ACM EIR seeks high-quality papers and subjects
them to a profound review process. While innovation and timeliness are
the major criteria for its acceptance, technical robustness and
readability will also be considered in the review process. Submit your
file at https://sigenergy-eir.hotcrp.com. Reviewed papers accepted for
publication are accessible through the ACM Digital Library.
Additionally, editorial content, like thoughts and discussions on new
research directions, is published with ACM EIR. Contact
[email protected] for any questions and ideas.

5. ICT for Sustainability — Paper submission due this month!

The International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) brings
together leading researchers, industry, government, public sector, civil
society representatives with an interest in using, analysing, designing
and deploying ICT for environmental, social, technical and economic
sustainability.

The conference provides a platform for a broad spectrum of research
discussing the role of ICT for sustainable development and welcomes
contributions from all academic fields—including computer science, the
humanities, natural, and social sciences—with a strong emphasis on
collaboration across disciplines. Thereby, the conference provides a
space for trans- and interdisciplinary exchange and inspiration for new
ideas and solutions.

We are excited to announce some key updates. Most importantly, the
submission system is now open, and deadlines for workshop proposals and
research papers are coming up soon—so don’t miss your chance to
contribute.

* Submission system & submission deadlines *
The submission system for all tracks is now open. You can find the links
on the respective track pages. Please consider the following submission
deadlines. Specifically, the deadlines for workshop proposals and
research papers are getting closer:
– Workshop proposals: 12 Dec 2025
– Research papers: 18 Jan 2026 (abstracts), 25 Jan 2026 (full paper)
– Demonstrations and posters: 16 Mar 2026
– Doctoral symposium: 19 Mar 2026

* Industry and Policy Leaders Day *
Plans for the Industry and Policy Leaders Day on 8 June 2026 are
progressing well! This event will kick off the conference, connecting
researchers with key decision-makers from politics, administration,
industry, and civil society. You can now view the first confirmed
speakers on our website — with more to be added soon.

* Facilitator *
We are glad to announce that Peter Woodward will facilitate the ICT4S
Conference 2026. Peter Woodward has wide experience in helping to bridge
differing perspectives on sustainability aspects and has facilitated
several ICT4S editions in the past. He has a passion and expertise in
designing and running participative processes on issues related to the
sustainable development agenda.

* Social Program *
ICT4S will offer a diverse program of social activities to help
participants connect, unwind, and make the most of their time together.
You can now explore the planned activities and events on our website.

More details here: https://conf.researchr.org/home/ict4s-2026

6. New Opportunity: IEEE Electric Grid Fellowship

Starting in 2026, IEEE-USA is launching the Congressional Electric Grid
Policy Fellowship.

As our power system faces unprecedented challenges in modernization and
resilience, technical experts must inform the decisions made on Capitol
Hill. This program places qualified IEEE members directly into
congressional offices or committees for a full-year, full-time term in
Washington, D.C.

** Fellowship Highlights **
– Role: Serve as a technical advisor to Congress on energy policy, grid
sustainability, and resilience.
– Term: One-year, full-time placement in Washington, D.C. (Starting
2026).
– Eligibility: Must be a U.S. citizen and an IEEE member (membership can
be obtained at the time of application).

Application & Details: ieeeusa.org/public-policy/government-fellowships

Questions: Contact [email protected]

7. Cornell University AI4S Seminar Series — Call for Speakers

The Cornell AI4S Initiative (CAISI) invites applications for speakers in
its AI4S Seminar Series. This interdisciplinary series highlights
cutting-edge research that integrates artificial intelligence (AI) with
sustainability science and energy systems. We welcome applications from
scholars and practitioners working at the nexus of AI, data science, and
sustainability, broadly defined.

For more information and to submit an application, please visit:
https://sustainability.ai.cornell.edu/seminars/

Please feel free to share this opportunity with colleagues or students
who may be interested in presenting.

8. Learning resource: Free Open-Source Graduate Textbook on Energy
Informatics

Professor Keshav has released the first chapter of a new free,
open-source graduate textbook on energy informatics, exploring the
intersection of computer science and modern energy systems — a key
domain for advancing climate resilience and sustainable infrastructure.
The first chapter focuses on the power grid, with additional chapters to
follow.

The textbook is available at: https://sk818.github.io/ebook/

9. ACM SIGEnergy resource for energy-related data sets

The ACM SIGEnergy website has a Resources page with a variety of data
sets that are freely available for use by the energy community. It is
available at https://energy.acm.org/resources/

We invite you to share any energy-related data sets, models, and
software we have not added to this page. Please send this information
directly to Gabe Fierro at [email protected].

10. Posting additional information

If you would like to post additional information, such as academic job
opportunities, Ph.D. scholarships, or a new energy systems course, then
please send me the details, and I will include them in the next monthly
newsletter. My email address is [email protected].

As always, the ACM SIGEnergy website has the latest information. We
welcome you to peruse it: https://energy.acm.org/