December 14, 2026
FULL ONLINE
co-located with 2026 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE Big Data 2026)
Phoenix, AZ, USA, Dec. 14-17, 2026
All accepted papers are expected to receive a waiver on the registration fee, more details to come!
In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, Data Spaces and Digital Twins are two pivotal data-driven elements whose integration creates new opportunities for multiple stakeholders. Data Spaces (DS) are secure virtual ecosystems for managing and aggregating heterogeneous real-time and historical data, enabling data sovereignty and interoperable data exchange. Digital Twins (DT) are virtual replicas used to simulate and analyse the behaviour of complex physical assets or systems, supporting data-driven decision-making and performance optimisation. Their use is particularly relevant for Critical Entities (CE), such as transportation, energy, and water infrastructures, and for Smart Urban Communities. In both contexts, the effectiveness of DT depends on the availability and quality of data, which are essential to strengthening the digital resilience of critical infrastructures.
The importance of integrating DT and DS is reflected in European initiatives and frameworks such as International Data Spaces (IDS), Gaia-X, the European data strategy, and the European Data Space for Smart Communities (DS4SSCC-DEP), which promotes federated DS deployments aligned with Europe’s Digital Decade objectives. As centralised cloud infrastructures are increasingly combined with distributed edge processing, DS must integrate heterogeneous data sources and support secure, scalable, and interoperable data exchange across systems and organisations. This is particularly important for critical entities, whose DT data often need to be shared with regulatory authorities, maintenance contractors, and other stakeholders while protecting them from unauthorised access, misuse, or deletion and preserving organisational and national data sovereignty. Such capabilities can also support the national resilience strategies and risk-assessment frameworks required by the EU Critical Entities Resilience Directive (CER), while enabling data-intensive processing and analytics in compliance with privacy and security requirements.
Now in its fourth edition and co-located with IEEE Big Data, the IEEE flagship conference in the big data sector, DSpaCES brings together researchers, practitioners, industry representatives, and governmental bodies to explore these opportunities and challenges. The workshop offers a stimulating forum for presenting emerging research, exchanging practical experiences, and fostering new collaborations at the intersection of Data Spaces, Digital Twins, and resilient smart systems.
This workshop is primarily aimed at researchers and practitioners interested in the design and development of data-driven data spaces and DTs for critical entities and smart urban communities.
We encourage submissions from computer scientists, data scientists, cybersecurity experts, urban planners, industry representatives, public authorities, and critical-infrastructure operators. We welcome original research papers, position papers, and case studies addressing topics including, but not limited to:
Data Spaces for big data processing, analytics, and data-driven DTs
Data models, pipelines, integration, interoperability, quality, provenance, and lineage
Data privacy, security, ownership, and sovereignty
Open and reusable platforms and technological enablers for DS and DT ecosystems
Distributed and federated DT architectures, including composition, orchestration, synchronisation, and consistency management
Edge–cloud continuum architectures and privacy-preserving federated analytics
Cross-domain DT federation for system-of-systems resilience
Generative AI and foundation models for synthetic data, scenario generation, semantic enrichment, and interaction with DS-enabled DTs
Agentic AI and multi-agent systems for autonomous monitoring, simulation, anomaly management, decision support, and risk mitigation
Verification, validation, safety, explainability, human oversight, governance, accountability, and compliance of AI-enabled DS and DT systems
Data-driven security, risk assessment, risk harmonisation, and resilience of Critical Entities
EU technology sovereignty, strategic autonomy, sovereignty-preserving architectures, and EDIC-based deployment models
Novel datasets, crowd-sourced data, citizen science, and societal impacts of DS and DTs
Applications in smart cities, urban planning, mobility, transportation, energy, water, healthcare, environmental monitoring, agriculture, emergency management, and crisis response.
Authors can submit their papers as well as find paper submission guidelines and templates at this LINK
The workshop accepts both full-length papers (up to 10 pages, references included) and short/position papers (up to 5 pages, references included).
Papers must be formatted according to the IEEE 2-column format (IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscript template). Formatting guidelines can be found here.
Full registration of IEEE Big Data 2026 is required for at least one of the authors for participating in the workshop.
Registration details and fees are available on the IEEE Big Data 2026 website:
Author information and deadlines: at least one author per paper must register as an AUTHOR at the full IEEE Member/Non-Member registration rate reported below (not the student member rate), regardless of whether they are a student.
Oct 15, 2026: due date for full workshop paper submission
Nov 5, 2026: notification of paper acceptance to authors
Nov 20, 2026: camera-ready of accepted papers
Nov 26, 2026 workshop registration (strict deadline!)
Dec 14, 2026: workshop (FULL ONLINE)
== To be yet announced ==
The workshop will be held as an online meeting via the Zoom platform.
Registered authors will receive all the instructions about how to join.
Workshop Chairs
Antonella Longo, Ph.D., M.Sc., IEEE Member
Associate Professor of Database and Information Processing Systems
DataLab, Dept. of Engineering for Innovation
University of Salento, Lecce (Italy)
ORCID: 0000-0002-6902-0160
Marco Zappatore, Ph.D., M.Sc., IEEE Senior Member
Associate Professor in Database and Information Processing Systems
DataLab, Dept. of Engineering for Innovation
& Department of Experimental Medicine
University of Salento, Lecce (Italy)
ORCID: 0000-0002-8277-9390
Alessandra Somma, Ph.D., M.Sc.,
Assistant Professor of Database and Information Processing Systems
Department of Information Technologies and Electrical Engineering, University of Naples Federico II, Naples (Italy)
ORCID: 0000-0001-5372-4588
Program Committee
Alessandra De Benedictis, University of Naples Federico II
Alessandro Lazari, F24
Ali Aghazadeh Ardebili, University of Trento, DIPSCO, CogNosco Lab
Anders Logg, Chalmers University of Technology
Chiara Rucco, University of Salento
Cristian Martella, University of Salento
Dessislava Petrova-Antonova, Sofia University
Fernando López Aguilar, FIWARE Foundation
Francesca Miccoli, University of Salento
Francesca Zampino, University of Salento
Luciano Alessandro Ipsaro Palesi, University of Florence
Nishu Gupta, University of Fribourg
Stefano De Panfilis, FIWARE Foundation
Tejaswani Dash, Capital Group
Tobia Martina, University of Salento
Vasilis Naserentin, Chalmers University of Technology
Viktoriya Degeler, University of Amsterdam
The workshop is organized in connection with ECHO-TWIN (Edge-Cloud-HPC Optimized Twins based on Workflow-enhanced Inference Networks), in the context of its networking and technology-transfer actions. The workshop's themes contribute to ECHO-TWIN's objectives by addressing Data Spaces and Digital Twins for critical entities and smart urban communities, with particular emphasis on interoperable and sovereign data sharing, heterogeneous data integration, distributed and federated architectures, Edge–Cloud–HPC infrastructures, AI-enabled analytics, security, resilience, explainability, governance and trustworthy deployment. These challenges are also central to the development of scalable and trustworthy Digital Twins and to their deployment across distributed Edge–Cloud–HPC infrastructures. By bringing together researchers, technology providers, critical-infrastructure operators, public authorities and other stakeholders, the workshop supports ECHO-TWIN's objectives of interdisciplinary networking, laboratory valorization and collaboration between research, public-sector and industrial communities.