Call for papers 

SIDS 2026: 1st Workshop on Secure and Intelligent Data Spaces (SIDS 2026)

Affiliated with the 27th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2026)

Key deadlines:

27 March, 2026            Submission of papers

15 April, 2026               Notification of acceptance

15 May, 2026                Camera-ready paper submission

29 June, 2026              Workshop day

Website: https://sids-mdm.github.io/2026/

A Data Space is a (potentially decentralized) entity representing regional or organizational units within a city that share common environmental characteristics, focus on a specific data domain, and are managed for a defined set of purposes. Within such data spaces, information collected by citizens' IoT and personal devices, as well as by platforms gathering relevant citizen data, can significantly contribute to improving safety, environmental sustainability, and overall wellbeing. These benefits arise through the enhancement of applications such as smart home management, household energy usage optimization, waste collection management, and urban mobility services.

Data Spaces provide the trusted, interoperable, and sovereign data infrastructure upon which AI-based applications can be safely trained, deployed, and continuously improved. By enabling controlled data sharing across organizational and administrative boundaries, Data Spaces form a key enabler for scalable, data-driven intelligence in smart cities and urban environments.

However, the federated and multi-stakeholder nature of Data Spaces also introduces new and critical AI-oriented cybersecurity challenges. Threats such as data poisoning, adversarial manipulation, model extraction, inference-based privacy leakage, and attacks on collaborative learning pipelines directly undermine the reliability, safety, and trustworthiness of AI-based services operating on shared data. Addressing these challenges requires AI-specific security mechanisms that are tightly integrated into Data Space architectures, governance models, and data management workflows.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from mobile data management, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and smart city systems to explore novel approaches, architectures, and methodologies for building secure, trustworthy, and intelligent Data Spaces.

Topics of interest

The workshop topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Data Spaces for smart cities and urban environments
• Mobile and IoT data management in federated Data Spaces
• AI-enabled services built on Data Spaces
• Collaborative Machine Learning and Federated Learning across Data Spaces
• Secure data sharing, governance, and data sovereignty mechanisms
• AI-oriented cybersecurity threats in Data Spaces
• Privacy-preserving AI techniques for Data Spaces (e.g., differential privacy, secure aggregation)
• Trust, explainability, and accountability of AI in Data Spaces
• Secure and resilient data pipelines for mobile and edge environments
• Compliance with regulatory frameworks (e.g., GDPR, AI governance)
• Real-world deployments, use cases, and lessons learned
• Runtime monitoring, continuous assurance, and lifecycle security of AI models
• AI supply-chain security and model provenance in Data Spaces
• Federated learning, adversarial robustness and secure Federated Learning for Data Spaces in the Cloud/Edge Continuum

Submission Guidelines

Accepted papers will be published in the MDM 2026 Workshop Proceedings and published by IEEE. Submitted papers must be original work that has not appeared in, and is not under consideration, for another conference or a journal. After being assessed for suitability by the workshop Chairs, all submitted papers will be single-blind peer-reviewed by the Program Committee members. Every submitted paper will be reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee.

Workshop papers may be up to 6 pages in the IEEE conference proceedings format.

All submissions need to follow IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscript Formatting Guidelines.

The templates can be found here: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates

Submissions will be received via Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sids2026

Please note that registering on the submission site with a title and meaningful abstract by the earliest deadline is required to enable the actual paper submission.

Organizers:

* Georgios Bouloukakis, University of Patras, gbouloukakis@upatras.gr, General Chair

* Antonios Makris, National Technical University, antoniosmakris@mail.ntua.gr, Program Co-Chair

* Konstantinos Tserpes, National Technical University, tserpes@mail.ntua.gr, Program Co-Chair

Program committee: 

• Battista Biggio, University of Cagliari, Italy 
• Nalini Venkatasubramanian, University of California, Irvine, USA
• Alexandros Gkillas, AViSense, Greece 
• Antonio Carta, University of Pisa, Italy 
• Ioannis Kontopoulos, National Technical University of Athens, Greece 
• Emanuele Carlini, National Research Council of Italy 
• Evangelos Haleplidis, University of Piraeus, Greece 
• Alessandro Palma, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy 
• Houssam Hajj Hassan, Orange Labs, France 
• Ajay Kattepur, Ericsson Research, India 
• Dusan Jakovetic, University of Novi Sad, Serbia 
• Nikolaos Georgantas, INRIA Paris, France 
• Roberto Yus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA 
• Shahin Abdoul Soukour, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France 
• Chih-Kai Huang, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France 
• Arne Broering, Siemens, Germany 
• John Violos, Université du Québec, Canada 
• Evangelos Psomakelis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

The workshop is partly supported by the CoEvolution project which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101168560. The workshop reflects only the view of the organizers and the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.