First International Workshop on AI and Serverless (WoAIS) 2026

Part of [1]20th ACM International Conference on Distributed and
Event-based Systems (DEBS 2026), Lisbon, Portugal (June 23rd–26th 2026)

WoAIS will be hybrid with both virtual and on-location formats. Please
note that while hybrid formats will be supported for workshops, the
DEBS 2026 steering committee wants the main conference to be held in
in-person only. Prospective attendees of the workshop should keep this
in mind if they plan to attend both WoAIS and DEBS 2026.

The rise of new AI agents—which involve multiple LLM calls, dynamic
plans, and a mix of code and AI models—is creating uniquely complex
workloads for serverless platforms. This new reality has already
resurfaced classic serverless headaches, such as cold starts, managing
state, and figuring out resource allocation, but within the demanding
context of modern AI applications. Furthermore, new complications are
emerging, including mixed GPU/CPU needs, unpredictable execution plans,
long-running yet highly bursty processes, and the critical need for
robust agent-to-agent communication.

Looking beyond the cloud, the scope of serverless is expanding. We aim
to look ahead at future architectures involving AI, hybrid clouds, and
especially edge/IoT devices, which current serverless platforms are not
well-equipped to support. This naturally leads to a discussion on the
role of LLMs in Serverless, where we will explore how hybrid serverless
platforms can be leveraged for the entire lifecycle of Large Language
Models (LLMs) and Foundation Models (FMs), from fine-tuning to serving.

This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to explore
aspects such as use cases, resource allocations, optimizations, and
using AI to improve serverless experience and to discuss their
experiences and ideas for future directions in serverless research.

As this year the workshop is hybrid and we are looking not only for
research papers, experience papers, demonstrations, or position papers
but also for live presentations of ongoing work, demonstrations, and
anything else that may be interesting to the workshop audience.

The latest version of this CFP is available at
[2]http://serverlesscomputing.org/woais1/

Topics

This workshop solicits papers from both academia and industry on the
state of practice and state of the art in AI and serverless computing.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
* AI Operating System: research on system-level infrastructure for
scalable intelligence, viewing world models as "operating systems"
for future AI agents
* Infrastructure for Scaling AI: Research is sought for distributed
training and evaluation systems, compilers, and data engines that
support continual updates
* Infrastructure and network optimizations for AI and serverless
applications
* Cloud Services for AI: scalable AI cloud services for tasks such as
the inspection of large-scale infrastructures
* Operating AI at Scale: extending monitoring and adaptation to
large-scale production environments with heterogeneous data streams
and real-time costs
* Cost per token, energy usage, cost to operate AI agents and models,
cost models, pricing models, and economics of AI and serverless
* Using serverless for AI pipelines
* Using serverless for inference serving of AI models and agents
* Autonomous Lifecycle Management for AI: topics such as
transitioning AI to operations and managing the infrastructure
challenges for AI adoption across its entire lifecycle
* Orchestrating multiple AI agents running as serverless functions,
addressing issues such as how to manage the synchronization if they
are working on sections of the same task
* Memory Layers for AI: implementing memory architectures for
LLM-based agents, including episodic vs. semantic memory, retrieval
mechanisms, and consolidation of interaction-driven experiences
* Cloud AI Security: AI-driven cybersecurity risk analysis and secure
machine learning for the vulnerability assessment of AI and related
technologies using serverless and other scalable techniques
* Elastic AI platforms and pay-as-you-go for GPUs with different cost
metrics. Using AI assist and generative LLMs such as ChatGPT for
building, running, and maintaining serverless-like applications.
* Supporting AI agents and with serverless approaches in agentic
platforms
* Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud for AI and serverless computing in
Edge, Fog, IoT, etc.
* Supporting Model Context Protocol (MCP) and using it in serverless
AI applications
* Supporting customization and running user provided AI models any
place: Cloud, Edge,Fog, IoT, etc.
* Evaluation, Benchmarking, and Reproducibility: early work and
proposals for standardized benchmarks and
* evaluations, in particular about reproducible AI research results
* Mixed GPU, accelerators, and CPU workloads for AI agents
* Running AI and serverless applications with stochastic plans
(unpredictable execution paths), bursty long-running processes, and
inter-process communications
* Developer experience as we transition from “traditional” serverless
and FaaS to AI agentic programming
* Developer productivity to build AI serverless code: from local
source to observability and maintenance in production
* Serverless data management for AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation
(RAGs), vector and graph databases applied to serverless
experience,
* AI and serverless for next-gen computing in Industry such as
Platform Engineering and Internal Developer Platforms and other
areas
* Low-code and no-code - new programming abstractions for AI and
serverless
* Debugging AI serverless applications
* Use cases, experiences with AI and serverless
* DevOps for AI and serverless
* Confidential computing
* Sustainable computing
* Granular computing
* Super-lightweight containers Web Assembly
* Swarm intelligence
* Other topics related to AI and serverless computing

Important Dates

Paper Submission: April 15, 2026 (AOE)
Notification of Acceptance: April 28, 2026
Final Camera-Ready Manuscript (Hard Deadline): May 15, 2026
Non-paper submissions (demos and other proposals): June 1, 2026
Author registration deadline: TBD
Workshop: June 23, 2026 (Tuesday)
Conference: June 23–26, 2026

Papers and Submissions

Papers submissions

Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished
research/application papers that are not being considered in another
forum.

Submitted manuscripts should be structured as technical papers and may
not exceed six (6) single-spaced double-column pages using ACM
proceeding style two-column “sigconf” which can be found on the ACM
template page [3]https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template,
font size set to 10 pt. The page limit contains all the content,
including bibliography, appendix, etc.

Shorter formats like extended abstracts (5 pages or less), posters, or
opinions are also accepted.

For information about Auxiliary Materials, please check here.
[4]https://2026.debs.org/acm-auxiliary-materials/

Note that submissions must be doubly anonymous - authors’ names must
not appear on the manuscript, and authors must make a good-faith
attempt to anonymize their submissions. This means that submitted
papers must be anonymous (not revealing author names). References to
authors’ previous work should be done in the third person to not reveal
their identities. There should be no acknowledgments of people or
projects. Supplementary material (e.g., GitHub or GitLab repository)
should not reveal the authors’ identities; to this end, anonymized
repositories can be used (e.g., [5]https://anonymous.4open.science).
See below for more details on the anonymity requirements for
doubly-anonymous reviewing.

This year's edition will place ACM Artifacts Available badges on papers
that make their artifacts available according to ACM's rules.

The DEBS conference organizers will provide companion proceedings
including all workshop papers, which will be available in the ACM
Digital Library. This is subject to the availability of their
camera-ready papers by the deadline for camera ready papers.

Authors should submit the manuscript in PDF format. All manuscripts
will be reviewed and will be judged on correctness, originality,
technical strength, rigour in analysis, quality of results, quality of
presentation, and interest and relevance to the conference attendees.
Papers conforming to the above guidelines can be submitted to “Workshop
on AI and Serverless Computing” track through the paper submission
system powered by Microsoft CMT
[6]https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/DEBS2026/.

All submitted manuscripts (following DEBS conference requirements on
formatting and page limits) will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 program
committee members. Accepted papers with confirmed presentation will
appear in the conference proceedings as well as in the ACM Digital
Library.

The authors of accepted papers will be given a choice between different
copyright agreements, according to the recent changes in the ACM
policy. The options will include opportunities for open access as well
as the traditional ACM copyright agreement.

Note that at least one author of each accepted workshop paper must hold
a full pre-conference registration.

ACM Policies

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby
acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all [7]ACM
Publications Policies, including ACM's new [8]Publications Policy on
Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations
of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by
ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to
other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an [9]ORCID ID, so
you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM
has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a
[10]commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors.
We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper
attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name
normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Important update on ACMs new open access publishing model for 2026 ACM
Conferences!

Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. All
ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will
be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for
publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional
model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). With over 2,600
institutions already part of ACM Open, the majority of ACM-sponsored
conference papers will not require APCs from authors or conferences
(currently, around 76%).

Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to
pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial
waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please
consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review
the
[11]https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/policy-on-discretionary-o
pen-access-apc-waivers. Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are
granted based on specific criteria set by ACM.

Understanding that this change could present financial challenges, ACM
has approved a temporary subsidy for 2026 to ease the transition and
allow more time for institutions to join ACM Open. The subsidy will
offer:

$250 APC for ACM/SIG members

$350 for non-members

This represents a [12]65% discount, funded directly by ACM. Authors are
encouraged to help advocate for their institutions to join ACM Open
during this transition period.

Anonymity Requirements for Doubly-Anonymous Reviewing

Every research paper submitted to DEBS 2026 will undergo a
''doubly-anonymous'' reviewing process: in addition to maintaining the
anonymity of the reviewers of the papers, the PC members and reviewers
will not know the identity of the authors. To ensure the anonymity of
authorship, authors must at least do the following:
1. Authors' names and affiliations must not appear on the title page
or elsewhere in the paper.
2. Funding sources must not be acknowledged anywhere in the paper
under review; these can be added to accepted papers upon submission
of the camera-ready manuscript.
3. Non-anonymized links to the authors’ online content must be
removed.
4. Research group members, or other colleagues or collaborators, must
not be acknowledged anywhere in the paper.
5. The paper’s file name must not identify the authors of the paper.

Authors should also use care in referring to related past work. The
solution is to reference past work in the third person (in the same way
that one would reference work by anyone else). This allows you to set
the context for your submission while at the same time preserving
anonymity.

Despite the anonymity requirements, authors should still include all
relevant work, including their own; omitting them could reveal the
author's identity by negation. However, self-references should be
limited to the essential ones, and extended versions of the submitted
paper (e.g., technical reports or URLs for downloadable versions) must
not be referenced. The goal is to preserve anonymity while allowing the
reader to grasp the context of the submitted paper fully. It is the
responsibility of authors to do their very best to preserve anonymity.
Papers that do not follow the guidelines or potentially reveal the
author's identity are subject to immediate rejection.

Other submissions

Authors are invited to submit proposals for demos and other
presentations that are not papers.

Proposals must be submitted as short abstracts (not longer than one
page) in PDF format using the paper submission system selecting "Other"
as submission type.

Accepted presentations will not be part of the conference proceedings
but will be part of the workshop agenda with dedicated time for live
presentation (with video backup), questions etc.

Workshop co-chairs

Paul Castro, IBM Research
Pedro García López, University Rovira i Virgili
Vatche Ishakian, IBM Research
Vinod Muthusamy, IBM Research
Aleksander Slominski, IBM Research

Steering Committee

Geoffrey Fox, Indiana University
Dennis Gannon, Indiana University & Formerly Microsoft Research
Arno Jacobsen, MSRG (Middleware Systems Research Group)

Program Committee (tentative)

* Alexandru Iosup, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
* Ali Kanso, Microsoft
* Amine Barrak Assistant Professor, Oakland University
* Azer Bestavros, Boston University
* Cristina Abad, Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (Ecuador)
* Dennis Gannon, Indiana University & Formerly Microsoft Research
* Eric Rozner, University of Colorado Boulder
* Etienne Rivière, UCLouvain
* Geoffrey Fox, Indiana University
* Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
* Hans-Arno Jacobsen, MSRG (Middleware Systems Research Group)
* Ian Foster, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
* Josef Spillner, Zurich University of Applied Sciences
* Kyungyong Lee, Kookmin University
* Lucas Nussbaum, LORIA, France
* Maciej Malawski, AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
* Maciej Pawlik, Academic Computer Centre CYFRONET of the University
of Science and Technology in Cracow
* Marc Sánchez Artigas, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
* Per Persson, Ericsson Research
* Peter Pietzuch, Imperial College
* Rich Wolski, University of California, Santa Barbara
* Rodric Rabbah, Nimbella and Apache OpenWhisk
* Rodrigo Fonseca, Microsoft Research
* Samuel Kounev, University of Wuerzburg
* Tyler R. Caraza-Harter, University of Wisconsin-Madison
* Volker Hilt, Bell Labs (Nokia)
* Wes Lloyd, University of Washington Tacoma

References

1. https://2026.debs.org/
2. http://serverlesscomputing.org/woais1/
3. https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
4. https://2026.debs.org/acm-auxiliary-materials/
5. https://anonymous.4open.science/
6. https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/DEBS2026/
7. https://www.acm.org/publications/policies
8. https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/research-involving-human-participants-and-subjects
9. https://orcid.org/register
10. https://authors.acm.org/author-resources/orcid-faqs
11. https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/policy-on-discretionary-open-access-apc-waivers"
12. https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess