Welcome!

Please read through the instructions below carefully before submitting. This page contains important information about the session formats, tracks, and what we are looking for in a proposal. We encourage you to submit your proposal early, as we will be reviewing submissions on a rolling basis.

Important dates

• The call for proposals opens on 25th August 2026 and will close on 19th October 2026, 23:59 IST.
• Final schedule announcement and programme curation: TBA

We recommend that you submit early to avoid any unforeseen circumstances that may hinder your submission from going through.
To prevent inadvertent data loss, we also recommend copying your answers into an external app at each step.

Session formats

For this edition of the conference, we are inviting proposals for:

• Talks: 30-minute sessions where the speaker presents their topic/work (this includes time for Q&A). The talks will be held on the conference day (20th December) and will be scheduled in parallel across the T.T. Jagannathan and A.M.M. Arunachalam auditoriums.
• Workshops: hands-on, 3-hour sessions, on the workshop day (19th December). The venue will be the seminar rooms HSB 209 and HSB 210 at the Department of Physics. The workshops will be scheduled in a morning slot from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM or an afternoon slot from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM (though please note that these timings are tentative).
• Posters: we will have a poster session on the conference day (20th December), where presenters can present their work in a dedicated setting. Posters should be designed to fit on a standard poster board (ISO A0 size), and should be visually engaging. Please note that you do not need to submit the final design of your poster via this form; you only need to submit an abstract.

You do not need to be a core maintainer of a scientific software project or a seasoned speaker to submit! Some of the best sessions come from someone showing how they solved a real problem in their own work. When you submit, you will be asked to choose a track. You may pick the one that best fits the concept of your session. We recommend treating the tracks as a guide rather than a fence. If a proposal falls a little outside any of the descriptions below, please submit it anyway!

Please note that all sessions will be conducted in person, and we require speakers to be physically present at the venue. We are unable to accommodate virtual presentations.

Scope

SciPy India advocates the use of free and open source software (FOSS) to promote the adoption of open standards and open science. As a result, we are unable to accept sessions built around proprietary software, or software whose source code is not available under an open-source license, as per the OSI definition of the term. Discussions about commercial and proprietary entities can take place as part of your session, as long as they are related and not the main focus of your overall topic. We are also not looking for product pitches.

Tracks

We will have a total of eight tracks for the 2026 edition.

1. General: This track is for proposals that do not clearly fit within another track, and for interdisciplinary work intended for a broad audience. It is also appropriate for talks that draw on multiple domains or tools. If you are unsure which track your proposal belongs to (especially among the ones listed below), please choose the General track.

2. Scientific computing in the sciences and engineering: This track showcases the applications of developing and using open source software across the sciences and engineering, using Python and allied languages such as R, C, C++, Julia, Fortran, Rust, and beyond. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

   • physics and astrophysics
   • chemistry, metallurgy, and materials science
   • computational biology, bioinformatics, and genomics
   • medicine, medical imaging, drug discovery
   • health data analysis
   • environmental, earth, atmospheric, and climate science
   • remote sensing and geospatial analysis
   • mechanical, electrical, civil, and aerospace engineering
   • complex systems and network science
   • quantum computing

   Proposals that apply machine learning or artificial intelligence methods to a specific scientific domain are also welcome.

3. Numerical, computational, and visualisation tools: This track covers libraries and packages that underpin scientific computing, including array and dataframe libraries, numerical methods, and core PyData tools such as NumPy, SciPy, pandas, statsmodels, scikit-learn, etc. – together with the wider ecosystem that has developed around them, such as Jupyter notebooks and other interactive computing environments, and beyond. Topics include the design, implementation, and maintenance of these tools, as well as their effective use in practice in real-world settings. Work that calls into compiled languages such as C, C++, Rust, Fortran, or Julia for performance or correctness is welcome. Similarly, we also welcome proposals about visualisation libraries and techniques for exploring data and presenting results.

4. AI, machine learning, and data-driven discovery: This track focuses on the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to advance scientific research, and the open source tools and infrastructure that support this work. Topics include machine learning methods developed for scientific discovery, simulation-based inference, the use of foundation models in research, training and inference at scale, and frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, MLX, scikit-learn, and so on. We welcome proposals that offer a critical assessment of where such methods have proven effective, as well as those that report a novel application or result.

5. High-performance computing (HPC): This track focuses on optimising scientific code for efficiency and scaling it across distributed systems. Topics covered will include parallelism, GPUs, clusters, and cloud resources, as well as the schedulers, workflow tools, and data management systems necessary to handle large computational workloads effectively. We particularly welcome presentations that explore the intersection of domain-specific science and computational scalability. Additionally, we encourage discussions on profiling and optimisation work, especially those addressing the trade-offs among performance, portability, and maintainability.

6. Reproducibility in research: This track concerns the practices that make research trustworthy and repeatable over time. Topics include reproducible workflows and analyses, environment and dependency management, packaging, testing scientific code, provenance, and sharing code and data to enable others to build on prior work. Proposals may address technical solutions, such as workflow managers or containerisation, as well as the organisational and cultural changes needed to sustain them. We also welcome accounts of reproducibility efforts that did not succeed, and the lessons that can be drawn from said efforts.

7. Teaching, education, and outreach: This track addresses the teaching and learning of scientific computing, and the work of widening participation in the field in India and beyond. Topics can include curriculum and course design, pedagogy, teaching materials and tools, the training of students and researchers, and outreach efforts that extend these skills into new and underserved classrooms and communities. We are also interested in accounts of what has worked in practice, whether in formal university courses, workshops, or self-directed learning.

8. Maintainers and community: This track covers the specific work of maintaining open source software and sustaining the communities around it. Topics include, but are not limited to, the experience of building an organisation or open source project, the process of landing a significant technical change for a project, challenges in long-term maintenance and feature development, funding and governance, documentation, and the nuances of managing the growth of contributors and an expanding user base. We encourage speakers to go the extra mile, move beyond project updates, and share lessons that others can apply to their own projects and communities.

Writing your proposal

A strong proposal should make the session easy to picture. Please tell us what it is about and who it is for, and give a sense of what your target audience will get from attending. Being specific helps! A talk that walks through a specific problem and how you handled it tends to be more interesting to sit through than a general overview of a topic. A workshop where attendees build something tangible is more engaging than one that is a lecture with slides going through a topic. An abstract for a poster should outline the main points it will highlight in each section, and mention any planned graphics, plots, or illustrations. It is fine for some parts of the work to be tentative, and we welcome discussing ideas that may change.

Ensure that your proposal fits one of the tracks listed above and that your topic is grounded in free and open source software and discussions of a scientific nature. Keep the description detailed, and include references where you can, such as links to slides, source code, documentation, research papers, previous recordings, or past talks/presentations at conferences and events.

Last but not least, we welcome proposals from first-time speakers! If you have never submitted a proposal before, that is fine; a clear idea counts for far more than speaking history.

Using AI systems to help structure your proposal, tidy it up, fix grammatical issues, or improve its coherence is completely fine. However, by submitting, you affirm that the work and ideas are your own and not wholly generated with an LLM or AI system

Review process

Proposals will be reviewed by the programme committee and various subject-matter experts across topics. We will try to share brief feedback on proposals with the submitters, though it will depend on the number of submissions.

All proposals will undergo rolling reviews. We recommend submitting as early as possible.

Mock sessions

We may run mock presentation sessions as part of the selection process for shortlisted proposals, regardless of the speakers' experience. These sessions will be conducted online, and we will provide feedback to the presenters in order to help them improve their presentations. Participation in mock sessions is highly recommended. We will share more details as the call for proposals opens.

Proposal mentorship

We are committed to supporting new speakers and first-time submitters. If you are new to speaking at conferences or would like guidance on preparing your proposal, we encourage you to reach out to us. Based on interest, we are planning to organise online mentorship sessions to help you refine your proposal or brainstorm relevant topics and talk/workshop/poster ideas. Stay tuned and follow us on our social media for more details!

Submissions close on 2026-10-19 23:59 (Asia/Kolkata), 1 month, 3 weeks from now.