Call for Industry Tracks - The Web Conference 2026

We invite contributions to the Industry Track of The Web Conference 2026 (formerly known as WWW). The conference will take place in Dubai, UAE, from April 13 to 17, 2026.

The Web Conference is the premier conference focused on understanding the current state and the evolution of the Web through the lens of different disciplines, including computing, computational social science, economics, and political sciences.

The Industry Track welcomes contributions showcasing original results obtained in an industrial environment, having clear industry relevance, and highlighting new research challenges motivated by practical tasks and practical settings. The Industry Track is distinct from the Research Track in that submissions focus on applied work describing, for example, an implementation of a system, acquisition of data, or application of a methodology, that solves a significant real-world problem and demonstrates benefits as well as impact. Submissions must clearly describe how their work has been deployed or released, and for how long.

This year, the Industry Track has been "elevated" to have equal standing with the Research Tracks. Consequently, the Industry Track papers will be part of the Main proceedings of The ACM Web Conference 2026, alongside the Research Tracks papers.

Important Dates

• Abstract deadline: September 30, 2025
• Full paper deadline: October 7, 2025
• Rebuttal period: November 24 – December 1, 2025
• Closed door discussion: December 1 – 10, 2025
• Meta-reviews due by: December 10, 2025
• Notification of acceptance: January 13, 2026
• Camera ready: January 25, 2026
• Conference: April 13 – 17, 2026

All submission deadlines are end-of-day in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.

Submission Guidelines

We will use OpenReview to manage the submissions and reviewing. Submissions will not be made public on OpenReview during the reviewing period.

All listed authors must have an up-to-date OpenReview profile. Here is information on how to create an OpenReview profile. Note OpenReview's moderation policy for newly created profiles:

• New profiles created without an institutional email will go through a moderation process that can take up to two weeks. Therefore, please start the process of creating a profile / account at OpenReview well ahead of time - requests to extend the submission deadline because you could not create an OpenReview account will be denied.
• New profiles created with an institutional email will be activated automatically (but you still should not wait to do so until the last minute :)

Your OpenReview profile will be used to handle conflicts of interest and paper matching to reviewers. To be considered complete, each author profile must be properly attributed with the following mandatory fields: current and past institutional affiliation (going back at least 5 years), homepage, DBLP, ORCID, and Recent Publications. In addition, other fields such as Google Scholar, LinkedIn, Semantic Scholar, Advisors, Advisees and Other Relations should be indicated wherever applicable.

Abstracts and papers can be submitted through OpenReview.

Scope

We welcome high-quality submissions that highlight novel applications, architectures, deployments, and insights derived from operational data, as well as engineering breakthroughs that push the boundaries of what is possible on the Web at scale.

Industry papers should emphasize practical relevance, system design trade-offs, real-world constraints, or lessons learned from large-scale deployments. Submissions may focus on new technologies, product experiences, tools, or services that address concrete problems faced in practice. We especially encourage papers that demonstrate measurable impact in industrial settings or those that bridge the gap between theory and application.

Papers will be reviewed with an emphasis on clarity, originality, significance of insights, and relevance to the broader Web community, with a focus on real-world applicability over theoretical novelty.

Submissions to the Industry Track may include, but are not limited to:

• Web Search and Recommendation Systems at Scale
• Applied Generative AI and Large Language Models (or more generally, foundation models) in Web Services
• Content Moderation, Trust & Safety, and Platform Integrity
• Personalization and User Modeling in Commercial Systems
• Real-time Data Processing and Stream Analytics
• Ad Targeting, Auction Systems, and Online Marketing Technologies
• Web-scale Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Technologies
• A/B Testing, Experimentation Infrastructure, and Causal Inference in Practice
• Scalable Machine Learning Infrastructure and MLOps
• Deployment and Monitoring of AI Models in Production
• Edge Computing, CDNs, and Performance Optimization for the Web
• Privacy Engineering and Federated Learning in Industry Settings
• Conversational Agents and Multimodal Interfaces for the Web
• Human-Centered Design and UX Innovations at Scale
• Engineering for Accessibility, Inclusivity, and Global Reach
• Industrial Applications of Blockchain and Web3 Technologies
• Operational Experiences with Open-source or Open-data Web Platforms
• Security, Abuse Prevention, and Fraud Detection at Web Scale
• Practical applications in healthcare

Submission Guidelines

Deadlines.

The submission deadlines are strict and no extensions, regardless of circumstances, will be allowed. Placeholder/dummy abstracts are forbidden.

Authorship

The ACM has a policy stating who can be considered an author in a submission. Every person named as the author of a paper must have contributed substantially to the work described in the paper and/or to the writing of the paper and must take responsibility for the entire content of a paper.

• Non-anonymity. Submissions are not anonymous, hence authors should list their names and affiliations.
• Maximum authorship. The number of submissions allowed per author to the Industry track is limited to 5 (five) maximum. If more than 5 papers are submitted with the same person listed as an author, the additional papers submitted after the first 5 by submission id, will be desk-rejected.
• Authorship changes. The full list of authors, including the ordering, must be finalized at the point of submission. There cannot be any addition, removal, or reordering of authors after submission time. The only changes allowed are the correction of spelling mistakes or new affiliation.

Formatting Requirements

Submissions must be written in English, in double-column format, and must adhere to the ACM template and format (also available in Overleaf). Word users may use the Word Interim Template. The recommended setting for LaTeX is:

\documentclass[sigconf, review]{acmart}

Submissions must be a single PDF file: up to 8 (eight) pages as the main paper, followed by references and an optional Appendix (that can contain details on reproducibility, proofs, pseudo-code, etc), for a maximum total PDF length of 12 (twelve) pages. The first 8 pages should be self-contained, since reviewers are not required to read past that.

Originality and Concurrent Submissions

Submissions must present original work—this means that papers under review at or published/accepted to any peer-reviewed conference/journal with published proceedings cannot be submitted. Submissions that have been previously presented orally, as posters or abstracts-only, or in non-archival venues with no formal proceedings, including workshops without proceedings, are allowed. Authors may submit work that is already available as a preprint (e.g., on arXiv or SSRN). The ACM has a strict policy against plagiarism, misrepresentation, and falsification that applies to all publications.

Serving as Reviewer

To ensure that all papers receive a sufficient number of high quality reviewers, every submission must nominate at least one author who is a qualified reviewer (i.e., authors with at least three papers in The Web Conference or other related conferences). Being nominated as a reviewer in the submission constitutes an acceptance and a commitment to carry out the regular reviewing load responsibly. Only if no qualified reviewer exists in the author list, nominate the best-qualified author for consideration by the PC chairs. Failure to provide a qualified reviewer when one exists in the author list, or failure to carry out the assigned reviewing duty properly, will constitute sufficient grounds for desk rejection. Note that authors with three or more submissions will be automatically included as a reviewer, even if not explicitly nominated by any submission, and will be expected to carry a full reviewing load.

LLM Policy for Authoring

Authorship means accountability for the work. As such, Large Language Models (LLMs) (e.g., ChatGPT) cannot be considered authors. Any use of LLM in the writing, programming, experimenting, etc., must be properly documented and declared in the submission form and described in an appendix (except for using AI for spell-checking and grammar-checking only). Any and all authors are fully accountable for the entire text in the paper.

Ethical Use of Data and Informed Consent

Authors are encouraged to include a section on the ethical use of data and/or informed consent of research subjects in their paper, when appropriate. You and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects (posted in 2021). Please ensure all authors are familiar with these policies.

Please consult the regulations of your institution(s) indicating when a review by an Institutional Ethics Review Board (IRB) is needed. Note that submitting your research for approval by such may not always be sufficient. Even if such research has been approved by your IRB, the program committee might raise additional concerns about the ethical implications of the work and include these concerns in its review.

Submissions that do not follow these guidelines or do not view or print properly, will be desk-rejected.

Reviewing Process

Reviewing

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the Industry Track Program Committee based on originality, significance, quality, and clarity. Each submission will receive at least three independent reviews, overseen by an Area Chair (AC). The review process will be single-blind, i.e., the identity of authors will be visible to reviewers and ACs.

At least one author per submission must commit to be a reviewer, carry the regular load, and submit all their reviews on time. If any author of a submission does not carry out the reviewing task in a proper and timely manner, no author of that submission will see the reviews of that submission during the rebuttal stage.

Non-LLM Policy for Reviewing

Reviewers must commit that they will not be relying on Large Language Models (LLMs) during reviewing. Any sort of uploading of paper content to any LLM is expressly prohibited. Reviewers cannot share the paper content with anyone else or with LLMs.

Rebuttal

Authors will have the chance to provide one length-limited response to each review during the rebuttal period. The rebuttal to any review will be visible to all reviewers. Reviewers will be prompted to acknowledge author rebuttals and revise their review if necessary. The ACs will consider the authors' response to the points raised by the reviewers, as well as discussion among reviewers, to inform acceptance decisions.

Withdrawal

Authors may use the withdrawal button on OpenReview up until the rebuttal deadline. Beyond that, any request to withdraw must be made to the Industry Track Chairs in writing, and approval for late withdrawal is at the discretion of the Industry Track Chairs.

Decision

A range of factors including technical merit, originality, potential impact, quality of execution, quality of presentation, related work, reproducibility of results, and ethics, will be used by the ACs to make a recommendation. The Industry Track Chairs will make the final decisions.

Transparency

By submitting paper(s), the authors agree that the original submission, reviews, meta-reviews, and discussions will be made public in OpenReview for only the accepted papers.

Publication and Presentation Policies

Publication

Each accepted paper will be included in the Main Proceedings of The ACM Web Conference 2026. In addition, each paper has the opportunity to submit a brief pre-recorded video, which will appear on ACM Digital Library, along with the PDF.

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Registration

To be included in the proceedings, every accepted paper must be covered by a distinct conference registration, e.g., two papers require two registrations, even if they have overlapping authors. This registration must be Full Conference (5-day) or Main Conference (3-day) registration, at the standard (non-student) in-person rate, payment of which must be completed by the camera-ready deadline. This registration requirement applies universally, regardless of attendance or presentation mode.

Presentation

Every accepted paper must be presented in-person at the conference. No-show papers may be withdrawn from the proceedings. There will be two forms of presentation:

• Oral Presentation. The Industry Track Program Committee will select a subset of the accepted papers for oral presentation.
• Poster Presentation. All papers will be asked to present a poster on-site.

Reproducibility

Authors are bly encouraged to make their code and data publicly available after the review process. We are encouraging the (optional) use of the "Artifacts Available" badge in ACM's Digital Library. If you release any code, dataset, or similar artifact to accompany your paper, and host it in a publicly available, archival repository for research artifacts that provides a Document Object Identifier (DOI), you are welcome to apply for this badge. A special subcommittee will check the artifacts of all accepted papers for availability and relatedness to the paper after the acceptance notification.

Industry Track Co-Chairs

Evgeniy Gabrilovich
Hady W. Lauw (Singapore Management University)
Natasha Noy (Google)

Contact: industry-www2026@acm.org