Welcome to the 2026 Principle and practice of data and Knowledge Acquisition Workshop (PKAW). Following the successful PKAW 2006 (Guilin, China), PKAW 2008 (Hanoi, Vietnam), PKAW 2010 (Daegu, South Korea), PKAW 2012 (Kuching, Malaysia), PKAW 2014 (Gold Coast, Australia), PKAW 2016 (Phuket, Thailand), PKAW 2018 (Nanjing, China), PKAW 2019 (Fiji), PKAW 2020 (Yokohama, Japan, online), PKAW 2022 (Shanghai, China), PKAW 2023 (Jakarta, Indonesia), PKAW 2024 (Kyoto, Japan), and PKAW 2025 (Wellington, New Zealand), PKAW 2026 will be collocated with the 23rd Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2026) and held in Guangzhou, China in 17-18 November 2026.

PKAW has provided a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss the state-of-the-art in the areas of knowledge acquisition and machine intelligence (MI, also Artificial Intelligence, AI). PKAW 2026 will continue the above focus and welcome the contributions to the multi-disciplinary approach of human and big data-driven knowledge acquisition and AI techniques and applications.

AI is changing the way in which organizations innovate and communicate their processes, products, and services. Also, in our daily life, AI-embedded devices such as smart speakers are about to become widely used, which extends the possibility of acquiring knowledge from users’ behavior observed through the interaction between those devices and their users. Knowledge acquisition and learning from big data are becoming more challenging than ever. Various knowledge can be acquired not only from human experts but also from heterogeneous data. Multidisciplinary research, including knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence and machine learning, human-computer interaction, etc., is required to meet the challenge. We invite authors to submit papers on all aspects of these areas.

Furthermore, not only in the engineering field but also in the social science field (e.g., economics, social networks, and sociology), recent progress in knowledge acquisition and data engineering techniques is realizing interesting applications. We also invite submissions that present applications tested and deployed in real-life settings and lessons learned during this process.

Proceedings of PKAW 2026 will be published by Springer as a volume of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series, which will be indexed by EI,Scopus, DBLP, SCImago, etc. The proceedings of past PKAW events can be found here.