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Call for papers

Note: the deadline has been extended to 27th May, 2024.

We invite researchers and engineers from the space domain to contribute their work on applying AI methods to space applications. Similarly, we invite researchers and engineers from the AI area to contribute work on novel methods they believe would be of high impact and interest to the space domain. SPAICE envisions a vivid exchange of ideas, concepts, and challenges between the fields of AI and space, building a bridge between them. Thus, we encourage a broad range of scientists and practitioners from both fields to submit their ideas and work.

To contribute to SPAICE, please submit a short paper with up to 4 pages (not including references). Submitted papers should focus on both novel/emerging AI techniques and/or their application to specific space domains. Papers will be selected following a single round of double-blind peer-review, after which the authors of accepted papers will be asked to submit a revised manuscript for inclusion in the conference proceedings. Template and submission guidelines can be found further below. You can find the submission page here.

Accepted short papers will be published as part of the conference proceedings. All papers as well as the proceedings will be indexed (with DOI) and archived (open access) using the Zenodo platform hosted by CERN. We will further compile two special issues on AI and space in the journals IAA Acta Astronautica and Springer Astrodynamics. During submission, you can select the option to be selected for submitting an extended paper for these special issues after the conference. Your extended paper will be assigned to the journal / issue with the highest thematic overlap.

We strongly support open science practices and therefore conference proceedings will be made publicly available under CC-BY-4.0. Authors of accepted papers retain the copyright of their work and are free to use it in follow-up publications. We further encourage authors to share their accepted publications on pre-print servers such as arXiv with a reference to the SPAICE conference.

For an accepted paper to be included in SPAICE 2024, at least one of the paper’s authors has to be registered and attend the conference in person to present their paper. If you are a student (BSc, MSc, PhD) and require funding to attend SPAICE and present your work, you can apply for an ESA Academy Conference Student Sponsorship.

Covered topics

SPAICE will mainly, but not exlusively, focus on the following application domains and AI techniques.

Application domains
  1. Guidance, Navigation, and Control
  2. Astrophysics and Astronomy
  3. Spacecraft Operations
  4. On-board AI (hardware and software)
  5. Earth Observation
  6. Telecommunications
  7. Robotics
  8. Materials and Habitats
AI techniques
  1. Deep Neural Architectures
  2. Natural Language Processing
  3. Evolutionary & Genetic Algorithms
  4. Reinforcement Learning
  5. Neuro-inspired AI
  6. Causal Inference
  7. Emerging Hardware Systems
  8. Other Machine Learning methods (AutoML, Trees, Kernel Machines, Gaussian Processes, …)

If your work on AI and space does not fall in any of these application domains and/or AI techniques, you can select “Other” in the drop-down menu during submission and specify a custom application domain / AI technique. In addition, you can provide keywords that describe your work in more detail.

Submission template and guidelines

The following LaTeX template has to be used to prepare the short paper: Template_SPAICE_2024.
Please do not adjust the provided template style to ensure a uniform look of the conference proceedings. A guideline and typesetting examples are provided within the template. The following key guidelines should be followed when preparing the short paper:

  • The maximum page limit is 4 pages, excluding references and acknowledgments, i.e., references and acknowledgments do not count into the page limit.
  • The short paper should contain the following sections: an abstract (200 words maximum length), an introduction, results, and a discussion. Additional sections and sub-sections can be added as required.
  • Please do not add page numbers or other footnotes / headers to your manuscript. We will add these when preparing the conference proceedings.
  • You have to submit the compiled PDF file of your paper to be considered for the conference. If you are new to LaTeX, we recommend you to use the online editor “Overleaf” (https://www.overleaf.com/) to prepare your manuscript. To start writing the paper, click on “New Project” at the top left, select “Upload Project”, and then drag and drop the LaTeX template (a zip folder named “Template_SPAICE_2024”) provided at the beginning of this section into the menu that pops up.

Contact

For questions regarding the submission, please contact either Dominik Dold or Alexander Hadjiivanov using {first name}.{last name}@esa.int.