2026 IEEE CSR Workshop on Cyber Situational Awareness, Incident Response, and Preparedness (CSAIP 2026)

 Call for Papers

The workshop aims to bring together experts from industry and the scientific community to address current challenges in the fields of Cyber Situational Awareness, Incident Response and Preparedness (CSAIP), and also to create a networking space in which to generate and share ideas and findings, as well as promote critical thinking.
Through specialized topics and the combination of related fields, the workshop purposes to address the main challenges of active defense to discover, analyze, and mitigate potential threats and vulnerabilities (e.g., zero-days), always bearing in mind the principles of eradication and recovery. The workshop focuses primarily on large-scale hyperconnected networks. These include from large corporate networks to complex cyber-physical systems and the industrial Internet of Things, whose resources and services are essential to the proper functioning of industry and the social welfare that depends on it.
In this regard, CSAIP 2026 covers multiple protection areas that contribute to proactivity and active defense. Among these areas, we highlight those related to preparation, situational awareness, and information sharing and cyber intelligence, threat hunting, and, above all, resilience through a dynamic and reliable response and recovery – thereby fulfilling the security lifecycle proposed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in its cybersecurity framework known as CSF 2.0. This also means that new technological trends, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its derivatives (e.g., Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), Large Language Models (LLM), or Generative AI (GenAI)); software agents supported by the AI agentic notion; simulation including digital twins and Cyber Ranges; blockchain; and supercomputing or hybrid computing, among others, can become drivers for the expected proactivity and defense in large-scale hyperconnected networks.
But to go beyond scientific literature and promote knowledge and human progress, the workshop will also address topics that dominate in current industrial paradigms, such as Industry 5.0/6.0. This also means that the first edition of the event will have the main mission of prioritizing solutions that promote the centrality of human beings in operations and their safety and security through dynamic, intelligent, and active security solutions under standardized and/or zero-trust architectures and approaches. All this without compromising the basic principles of privacy contemplated in current European regulatory frameworks, such as NIS2, AI Act, CRA, or GDPR.

The CSAIP 2026 workshop is designed to address a clearly defined and scientifically coherent subject, namely Cyber Situational Awareness, Incident Response, and Preparedness, positioned squarely within the core themes of CSR 2026. By focusing on the full lifecycle of cyber defense in large‑scale hyperconnected environments, the workshop complements the main conference areas by deepening the technical and scientific discussion around proactive defense, threat discovery, dynamic response, and resilience engineering.
CSAIP 2026 advances the CSR 2026 agenda by concentrating on the scientific challenges of active defense in complex digital ecosystems, including corporate networks, cyber‑physical systems, and the industrial Internet of Things. These environments represent critical infrastructures whose security and resilience are central to the mission of the CSR 2026 conference. The workshop’s emphasis on situational awareness, threat intelligence, incident response, and recovery directly reinforces the conference’s focus on cybersecurity and resilience research.
In addition, CSAIP 2026 complements CSR 2026’s broader scope by specializing in the integration of emerging technologies such as AI/ML, LLMs, agentic systems, digital twins, cyber ranges, blockchain, and hybrid computing, as enablers of proactive defense and large‑scale preparedness. This specialization provides a dedicated scientific forum for exploring how these technologies can operationalize the NIST CSF 2.0 lifecycle in real‑world, high‑complexity environments.
Finally, the workshop extends CSR 2026’s coverage by incorporating human‑centric and regulatory dimensions aligned with current industrial paradigms (Industry 5.0/6.0) and European cybersecurity frameworks (NIS2, AI Act, CRA, GDPR). This ensures that CSAIP 2026 not only complements the technical focus of the main conference but also enriches it with interdisciplinary perspectives essential for modern cyber‑resilience research.

Topics of Interest

Prospective authors are encouraged to submit previously unpublished contributions from a broad range of topics, which include but are not limited to the following:

› Governance, regulated management, and dynamic risk management
› Adversarial offense, modeling, and demonstrations
› Green proactivity through lightweight AI-enhanced approaches for CSAIP
› Advanced discovery, prediction and detection of threats and vulnerabilities
› Advanced attack response, playbooks, mitigation, eradication, and recovery
› Threat hunting through situational awareness, traceability, and feedback

› Cyber threat intelligence and coordination
› Sharing data, trust management and privacy issues
› Human-centered preparedness under dynamic approaches and simulation
› Auditing and accountability for situational awareness
› Practical use cases with useful demonstrations for hyperconnected networks deployed in Security Operations Centers (SOCs), operational networks, and strategic sectors such as energy, healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, etc.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: April 13, 2026
Authors’ notification: May 4, 2026
Camera-ready submission: May 25, 2026
Registration deadline (authors): May 25, 2026
Workshop dates: August 3–5, 2026

Submission Guidelines

Submitted manuscripts should not exceed 6 pages (plus 2 extra pages, being subject to overlength page charges) and should be of sufficient detail to be evaluated by expert reviewers in the field. The workshop’s proceedings will be published by IEEE and will be included in IEEE Xplore subject to meeting IEEE Xplore’s scope and quality requirements.

The guidelines for authors, manuscript preparation guidelines, and policies of the IEEE CSR conference are applicable to CSAIP workshop. Please visit the authors’ instructions page for more details. When submitting your manuscript via the conference management system, please make sure that the workshop’s track 2T4 CSAIP is selected in the Topic Areas drop down list.

Workshop Committees

Workshop Chairs

Contact Us

fabio.martinelli@icar.cnr.it
javierlopez@uma.es

Program Chairs

Sokratis Katsikas, Norwegian University of Science and Technology – NTNU (NO)
Cristina Alcaraz, University of Malaga (ES)

Technical Program Committee

Panagiotis Bountakas, Sphynx (CH)
Alvaro Cardenas, University of California, Santa Cruz (US)
Mauro Conti, University of Padua (IT)
Roberto Di Pietro, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (SA)
Vasileios Gkioulos, Norwegian University of Science and Technology – NTNU (NO)
Dieter Gollmann, Hamburg University of Technology (DE)
Xinyi Huang, Fujian Normal University (CN)
Sotiris Ioannidis, Technical University of Crete and Foundation for Research and Technology (GR)
Nektaria Kaloudi, SINTEF Digital (NO)
Georgios Kavallieratos, Norwegian University of Science and Technology – NTNU (NO)
Nicholas Kolokotronis, University of the Peloponnese (GR)
Thomas Kyriakakis, Dienekes (GR)
Weizhi Meng, Lancaster University (UK)
Omar Orta, Plexus (ES)
Awais Rashid, University of Bristol (UK)
Roberto Setola, University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome (IT)
Karl Waedt, Framatome (DE)
Christos Xenakis, University of Piraeus (GR)
Jianying Zhou, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SG)

Publicity Chairs

Wenjuan Li, Education University of Hong Kong (CN)

Supported By

Program Information