General Information

The 2026 NetLogo Conference will be held June 29 - July 1 in Chicago at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For more information about the conference and registration, see here: https://www.netlogo.org/netlogo_con_2026/

Presentation types

The NetLogo user conference is a place to share many kinds of work in many fields. All presentations should in some way address NetLogo (or related software such as NetTango), agent-based modeling, or modeling literacy. We encourage work related to education, scientific or commercial research, art, and other fields. We also welcome work that is not formal or mature enough for publication in the open literature.
We are soliciting abstracts for four distinct types of presentation. The conference organizing committee will review the abstracts to select presentations for the available time slots.

1. Oral Presentations

Oral presentations (typically with presentation slides) will be made to the conference audience. Typical oral presentations will address how some specific problem in research or education was addressed using agent-based modeling or NetLogo. We anticipate two concurrent sessions of oral presentations on Monday and Wednesday, with each speaker having 15 minutes to present and 5 minutes for questions. Abstracts submitted for oral presentations may instead be accepted for poster/demonstration presentation.

Optional submission to special journal issues
We have preliminary arrangements with two journals to publish work presented at this conference in special issues. The journals are Individual-Based Ecology (a new journal dedicated to individual- and agent-based approaches in biology and ecology; https://ibe.pensoft.net/) and the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS, an established on-line journal that has long served the NetLogo community; https://www.jasss.org/JASSS.html). Both journals are open-access and publication is free, though donations to JASSS are encouraged. To participate, indicate which journal you want your work to be considered for when you submit your abstract (below). If we have enough participation of sufficient quality, you will be invited (after the conference) to submit a full journal manuscript. These manuscripts will undergo the full peer review process and must meet the journals’ criteria to be accepted for publication. Accepted manuscripts from the conference will be published together.

2. Poster/demonstration presentations

Poster/demonstration presentations should address the same topics as oral presentations, but in a poster session on Monday afternoon. Presenters can use a paper poster, a computer demonstration (on their own machine), or both.

3. Tips and tricks presentations

Tips and tricks presentations will be short (10 minutes, including questions) explanations and demonstrations of clever ways to program useful functions in NetLogo. These presentations will be made in a special session. If you have clever code that may be useful to others, a general way to solve a common NetLogo coding problem, or an extension that more people need to know about, show us!

4. New modeler forum discussions

New modeler forum discussions will be presentations of work in progress, with the purpose of discussing specific unresolved challenges with more experienced modelers. We expect most presenters to be university students or other early career researchers, or educators inexperienced with modeling. Abstracts should identify the system and problem being modeled and the challenges that the presenter wants to discuss. We anticipate allocating ~30 minutes per participant, with 10 minutes of presentation and the rest of the time for discussion.

5. Workshops

Workshops will be session dedicated to hand-on learning of topics such as GIS + ABM and designing and using educational curricula with NetLogo. If you have a proposal for a workshop you would like to run, you can propose it here.

Submissions close on 2026-03-02 10:54 (US/Central), 1 month, 2 weeks from now.