Announcing ACM Sustainability Week 2026

To the ACM SIGEnergy, e-Energy, and BuildSys Communities,

In June 2026, ACM SIGEnergy is excited to announce that it will host the first annual ACM Sustainability Week that will co-locate its flagship conferences, ACM e-Energy and ACM BuildSys, along with associated workshops.  These conferences represent the top conferences in the world focused on research at the intersection of computing and energy.  The inaugural ACM Sustainability Week will be held at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity within Banff National Park in Banff, Alberta, Canada.  Banff’s amazing natural landscape, including nearby mountains, glaciers, lakes, and hiking trails, makes it an ideal venue for a forum presenting state-of-the-art sustainability-focused research.  Please make plans to submit your best work to e-Energy and BuildSys and to attend in June 2026!  Note that this change will shift BuildSys from having a summer deadline in 2026 to a winter deadline (likely in mid-to-late January 2026), so make sure to plan accordingly!

Below, we discuss some of the reasons that motivated the creation of ACM Sustainability Week and for co-locating e-Energy and BuildSys.  The catalyzing event was ACM SenSys’s decision in Fall 2024 to merge with other conferences and become part of the CPS-IoT Week event held annually in the Spring.  ACM BuildSys originally evolved out of a workshop held at SenSys, and so, historically, had been co-located with SenSys and held annually in November since 2009.   The SIGEnergy Executive Committee and the BuildSys Steering Committee discussed multiple options for BuildSys moving forward, including not only co-locating with e-Energy, but also holding a stand-alone conference or exploring a merger with CPS-IoT Week.  Indeed, we’d like to highlight that ACM BuildSys 2025 will be held as usual in November 2025 as a stand-alone conference at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado (with the usual summer 2025 paper deadline)!  Thanks to Dong Chen at Mines for hosting and serving as General Chair!

Ultimately, the committees felt that co-locating BuildSys with e-Energy could provide a foundation for an exciting event that showcases the full breadth and depth of SIGEnergy’s research.   BuildSys and e-Energy represent separate, but complementary, research communities that can mutually benefit from closer interactions with each other.  ACM BuildSys generally emphasizes optimizations at the “edge’’ of the energy system—the buildings, cities, and transportation systems that consume energy—and thus has strong intersections with both civil and mechanical engineering.  Since BuildSys grew out of a computer systems conference (SenSys), the community often takes a systems approach to solving problems.  ACM e-Energy generally emphasizes optimizing the energy “network,’’ e.g., power generation, transmission, and distribution systems, and thus has historically had strong intersections with the power systems community and electrical engineering.  ACM e-Energy also evolved, in part, out of computer networking and an interest in exploring how to apply computer networking and distributed systems principles to energy systems.  As a result, the e-Energy community has often taken an algorithmic optimization approach to solving problems.   

In essence, BuildSys and e-Energy both apply computational techniques to optimize energy and carbon emissions but often from different perspectives using different approaches.  Thus, one goal in co-locating the conferences is to expose both communities to a wider range of perspectives and approaches.  As such, Sustainability Week will include a number of joint events across both conferences, including plenary talks, poster/demo sessions, workshops, and a Ph.D. forum.  As mentioned above, another important goal is to provide a showcase event for ACM SIGEnergy.  As a relatively new SIG with a strong inter-disciplinary component, there are many in the broader computing research community that may not be aware of us.  We hope that this annual event will provide a larger platform to increase the visibility of SIGEnergy-sponsored research across both conferences.   We’d like to emphasize that, while BuildSys and e-Energy will co-locate and coordinate closely as part of Sustainability Week moving forward, they will remain independent conferences with their own steering committees, program committees, review processes, and control over topical emphasis.

We will provide further updates on details for the 2026 ACM Sustainability Week as they become available. We look forward to seeing everyone in Banff in June 2026!

Sincerely,

David Irwin (SIGEnergy Chair)

Jorge Ortiz (BuildSys Steering Committee Chair)

Adam Wierman (e-Energy Steering Committee Chair)

Omid Ardakanian (Sustainability Week General Co-Chair)

Clayton Miller (Sustainability Week General Co-Chair)