International Workshop on Semantic Communications and Networking (SCN 2026)

Recently, in view of future Artificial Intelligence (AI)-native networks and agentic communications, the gap between network and applications is being bridged by the emerging paradigm of semantic and goal-oriented communications, by which the transmitter adapts data representation to the reasoning capabilities of the receiver, and the network adapts resource allocation and lower layer configurations, according to application parameters.
This changes the typical paradigm of networks, which separates the concern of the network provider (i.e., reliably transporting bits) and that of the application (i.e., the task works as expected). This integrated approach opens new opportunities and challenges at all network layers, thus calling for contributions from diverse research communities, including networking, physical layer and artificial intelligence. This workshop, supported by the SNS JU project 6G-GOALS, calls for a broad view of semantic and goal-oriented communications, spanning theoretical aspects and practical implementations, highlighting design and optimization challenges in semantic communication systems, but also architectural evolutions able to bridge the gap between network and applications.

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Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Theoretical foundations, including information-theoretic limits and models for semantic communication

• AI-native semantic communication systems, including learning-based encoding and decoding strategies and foundation models for communication

• Goal-oriented and task-driven communication and networking

• Multi-modal semantic communications, integrating heterogeneous data sources such as text, vision, audio, and sensor data

• Token-based semantic and goal-oriented communications

• Network architectures and protocols enabling semantic-aware routing, and resource allocation

• Network optimization for semantic communications, including adaptive and learning-based resource management

• Quality of Experience (QoE) and semantic-aware metrics, addressing evaluation, benchmarking, and performance assessment

• Privacy, security, and trust, including robust and privacy-preserving semantic representations

• Sustainability and energy efficiency, focusing on resource-aware and green semantic communication systems

• Coexistence of semantic, goal-oriented and legacy systems

• Communication and compute trade-offs in semantic and goal-oriented enabled systems

• Standardizing semantic and goal-oriented communications

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Confirmed Keynote

Title: The role of knowledge representation in next generation communication systems

Prof. Sergio Barbarossa (Sapienza University of Rome)

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Paper Submission Guidelines

Papers submitted to SCN 2026 Workshop will be assessed based on originality, technical soundness, clarity and interest to a wide audience. All submissions must be written in English and must use standard IEEE two-column conference template, available for download from the IEEE website: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html

Workshop papers can be up to 8 pages , including tables, figures and references.

Only PDF files will be accepted for the review process and all submissions must be done electronically through EDAS at: https://edas.info/N35284

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Important Deadlines:

• Workshop paper submission deadline: 11 July 2026
• Acceptance notification: 15 August 2026
• Camera-ready paper submission: 25 August 2026
• SCN 2026 Workshop date: 29 September 2026

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Workshops Chairs: