Call for Presentations: Chameleon User Meeting 2026

The Sixth Chameleon User Meeting will be held April 15-16, 2026 at the NCAR Mesa Lab in Boulder, Colorado. This year's meeting's theme focuses on computer science research and education in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). The objective of the meeting is to create a community discussion on AI research, approaches to education, and most importantly what platform you need – or may need in the future – to solve the hard problems and train the workforce of the future. We invite researchers and educators using Chameleon to submit presentation proposals sharing their experiences. Come to network with scientists working on similar topics, share tips on how to muster resources and data for hard-to-get experiments, and find materials and digital artifacts to teach AI classes!

As in previous years, we will reimburse travel expenses of up to $1,500 for the presenting authors of the top 10 selected abstracts (one author per abstract).

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: February 6, 2026 at 11:59 PM (any time zone on Earth)
• Acceptance notification: February 11, 2026
• Submit by sending mail to: presentations@chameleoncloud.org

Submission Instructions

Email your final submissions to presentations@chameleoncloud.org before the deadline.

Presentation proposals should be submitted as PDF documents, 2 pages in length, and include:

• Presentation title
• Author/Presenter name(s) and affiliation(s)
• Chameleon project ID(s) under which work was carried out
• Contact email
• If your presentation gets accepted, would you be interested in submitting a full paper? (Please put a statement, e.g., "Interested in full paper submission")

We are particularly interested in presentations that address AI and ML research on cloud testbeds. While we expect you to explain enough about your research or education projects to make the platform requirements clear, we also want you to save the important results for sharing at high ranking research conferences – your submissions here should focus on infrastructure requirements (hardware, configuration, etc.), experimental apparatus, challenges, and lessons learned.

Your proposal should address the following:

1. Project Overview. Briefly describe your research project or educational activity. What problem are you addressing? What is your approach?

2. Infrastructure Requirements & Usage. What specific Chameleon capabilities did you leverage? This might include:

• Hardware configurations (GPU types, accelerators, bare metal access)
• Networking and storage requirements
• Software stack control and customization
• Reproducibility features
• Heterogeneous resources and their management

3. Challenges & Insights. What worked well and what didn't? Where did you encounter bottlenecks or limitations -- whether in hardware availability, configuration complexity, software maturity, or experimental workflow? What was particularly valuable (and we should do more of) and features or capabilities are missing? How did Chameleon's capabilities compare to other public clouds and/or commercial cloud platforms for your specific needs?

4. Services, Tools & Workflow Support. What services or tools (beyond raw infrastructure) were critical to your work? This might include orchestration platforms, experiment management systems, data pipelines, reproducibility frameworks, or user interfaces. Where did existing tooling fall short? What gaps exist between infrastructure capabilities and researcher-friendly workflows?

We especially encourage submissions that:

• Provide detailed, specific insights about infrastructure requirements for AI/ML workloads
• Discuss challenges unique to AI research and education
• Represent diverse AI/ML domains (robustness/safety, sustainability, systems optimization, federated learning, education, etc.)
• Offer concrete recommendations for testbed evolution

Review & Selection

Submissions will be reviewed and ranked by a program committee to be announced soon. Selection will be based on the depth of infrastructure insights, relevance to the AI/ML research community, potential to inform testbed development, and contribution to productive discussion.

Travel Support

For the top 10 selected abstracts, we will reimburse travel expenses of up to $1,500 for one presenting author per abstract. Submitting a presentation proposal serves as your travel support application. Reimbursement covers transportation, lodging, and meals for attendance at the User Meeting.

What to Expect After Acceptance

Accepted presenters will be expected to:

• Attend the User Meeting in person
• Deliver a ~15-minute presentation on the morning or afternoon of April 15th
• Participate in a panel discussion following the presentation sessions
• Contribute insights to a post-meeting community report documenting infrastructure requirements, challenges, and recommendations for advancing AI research testbeds

This report will be published and shared with the research community to guide future development of Chameleon and similar cyberinfrastructure.

Questions?

Follow updates on the User Meeting from our website: https://chameleoncloud.org/chameleon-cloud-users-meeting/sixth-chameleon-user-meeting

Contact us at contact@chameleoncloud.org or via the Chameleon users mailing list.

We look forward to learning from your experiences and working together to build better infrastructure for AI research!