HCII 2026 was held as an 'on-site' Conference with the additional option for 'on-line' participation, under the auspices of 21 distinguished international boards of 530 Members from 52 Countries.
This year’s Conference has attracted 2.749 registered participants from 79 countries. These two numbers represent more than the size of the Conference: they reflect the diversity of our community and the associated extraordinary range of experiences, disciplines, and perspectives. The Conference program included:
- 20 Courses
- 2 Workshops
- 343 parallel sessions
- poster presentations
- poster pitches
- Student Design Competition
- the Conference exhibition
- the HCII 2026 Design Café
Springer (part of Springer Nature) is the publisher of the 53-volume set of the Conference Proceedings. A total of 7557 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry, and government agencies from 96 countries submitted contributions. 1463 papers and 361 posters (as short research papers) are included in the volumes of the proceedings published just before the start of the Conference. 374 papers and 128 posters are also accepted for inclusion in the ‘HCII 2026 - Late Breaking Work" volumes of the Proceedings to be published after the Conference. All volumes together will comprise the full set of the HCII 2026 Conference Proceedings.
Yoshua Bengio, Professor of Computer Science at Université de Montreal, Co-President and Scientific Director of LawZero, as well as the Founder and Scientific Advisor of Mila and the Canada CIFAR AI Chair, was the recipient of the ‘2026 HCI Medal for Societal Impact’ and keynote speaker at the Opening Plenary Session. Bengio’s keynote entitled ‘A New Pathway to Safe Advanced AI’ is befittingly commented below by Ben Shneiderman.
As established in the HCII conference series, twenty-two awards were conferred during the Opening Plenary Session. The awards, in the form of a plaque and a certificate, were presented to the author(s) of the Best Paper of each Thematic Area / Affiliated Conference and of the Best Poster.
In the context of the HCII 2026 Student Design Competition, a nine-member international committee acted as the jury and evaluated the 33 accepted submissions (all of which were presented in a rolling video during the Conference). Three awards were conferred during the Opening Plenary Session, each carrying a prize: the GOLD received $1,000 USD, the SILVER $500 USD and the BRONZE $250 USD.
A Students’ networking social event, complimentary for registered student participants, took place ‘on-site’ in the evening of the 30th of July, offering students the opportunity to get together and exchange ideas in a truly international and multicultural setting.
The HCII 2026 Design Café, an interactive satellite event, was held ‘on-site’ during the HCII 2026 Conference. The focus of the HCII Design Café was on Human-AI Teaming (HAT) – 2nd Edition, building upon and aiming to further develop the findings and outcomes of the HCII2025 Design Café (1st edition).
The HCII Conference has established a long-term collaboration with the World Usability Initiative (WUI), founded and directed by Elizabeth Rosenzweig. The 2025 World Usability Initiative (WUI) Design Challenge with the theme "Emerging Technologies and Human Experience" award winners were announced on World Usability Day. The Design Challenge Awards (Gold $1,250; Silver $1,000; and Bronze $750), sponsored by the HCII2026 Conference, were conferred during the Opening Plenary Session. The three award winners were invited, with complimentary registration, and presented their work in a special hybrid session on the 29th of July.
We would like to thank all Conference participants for their valuable contribution towards the success of this Conference.
We look forward to welcoming you all in the HCII 2027 Conference, to be held in Estrel Hotel and Congress Center, Berlin, Germany, 25-30 July 2027.
Bengio declares that “Humanity has Agency” in HCI International 2026 Conference Opening Keynote
Yoshua Bengio delivered a powerful and thought-provoking opening keynote for the HCI International 2026 Conference (July 26-31, 2026, Montreal, Quebec, Canada). He warned about the imminent dangers from AI systems, while calling for vigorous research on strategies to ensure systems that are “safe-by-design.”
In my introduction, I pointed out that Bengio speaks from authority as the most cited scientist in any discipline, with more than 1.1 million citations, stemming from his groundbreaking work on deep learning, which laid the basis for the current excitement about and widespread use of Large Language Models. He is a Professor at the Université de Montreal, where he holds a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Chair and he founded the Mila Research Center, which consists of more than 1500 researchers.
His inspiring keynote was the featured event, tied to the 2026 HCI Medal for Societal Impact, presented to Bengio by Conference General Chair Constantine Stephanidis. The Medal honors people whose work has made important contributions to society and to the field of Human-Computer Interaction.
Bengio began by declaring that “AI systems must demonstrably and verifiably not cause intolerable harm”, then advocating for the importance of sharing power, so as to avoid AI becoming an "instrument of domination." He added the vital corollary that "the wealth and beneficial knowledge generated by AI must be evenly distributed." These are three admirable goals, which are worth fighting for, but considering the profit-driven decisions by current leaders, they will be difficult to achieve.
Expanding on the safe-by-design theme, Bengio pointed to two reports from large international committees that he chaired. He emphasized their shared conclusions that “current safeguards are improving, but remain fallible and cannot keep pace with the growth of AI capabilities,” adding a warning that “pure competition between companies and countries is likely to lead to a race to the bottom.” Because current evidence about AI systems is “often inconclusive, conflicting, and lags behind the pace of development,” he pushed for better evidence about the state of AI systems. He advocated for a balanced combination of social approaches to improve policies and technical refinements that mitigate AI risks.
Bengio also founded the non-profit startup, LawZero, to develop Scientist AI, which is a “new methodology to create safe-by-design AI systems [with] honesty as a design principle for ethical behavior… prioritizing transparency and veracity over agreeing to please the user.” The technical principles for Scientist AI are in a multi-author paper, “Safety from Honesty in a Disinterested AI Predictor” (June 30, 2026), for which Bengio is the first author. Their “approach to alignment” is based “on epistemic humility to enable conservatively safe decisions.”
Bengio’s optimistic closing remark was that “humanity has agency,” suggesting that we collectively have the capacity to produce positive outcomes, and then calling on the audience to become active in working to develop beneficial AI systems.
NOTE: This summary will also be sent to the Human-Centered AI Google Group, with a follow up description of the International AI Safety Report 2026 (February 2026, 160 pages). Readers can join the group to receive Ben Shneiderman’s occasional posts: https://groups.google.com/g/human-centered-ai