Open Problems from Industry

IEEE CoG 2026 · Industry Day · Session 2

Identifying Research Gaps and Publishing Industry Perspectives

This session creates a structured forum for identifying open problems, research gaps, and opportunities for collaboration within the games research ecosystem, with a focus on surfacing challenges that are visible in industry but underrepresented in academic conversation.

If you are interested in attending this workshop, please complete the Open-Problems Proposal form below. Our workshop Discord server is also coming soon! 

If you are interested in presenting the problem as one of our lightning talk speakers, please check the box in the form. 

All submissions are DUE Friday, August 14, 2026 11:59:59 PM AoE.  

A Google Doc version of the ToG@CoG Session calls is available HERE. 

Schedule 

Friday September 4, 2026 (Industry Day) Madrid Local Time

14:15 – 14:35

Lightning Talks 20 min

14:35 – 15:05

Collaborative Breakout Discussions 30 min

15:05 – 15:15

Cross-group Discussion and Synthesis 10 min

Expected Outcome

• A stronger community of academic and industry researchers

• Continued discussion spaces and working groups (e.g., Discord) 

• A community-driven roadmap, editorial, or open-letter publication to be published in IEEE Transactions on Games (ToG)

• Strategic plans to foster future partnerships 

• Actionable recommendations for conferences, journals, and publication models

Call for Lightning Talk Presenters and Open-Problem Proposals: 

We're inviting submissions describing an open problem, research gap, or emerging challenge from your work that you believe would benefit from academic collaboration. This is intentionally low-effort. Submissions will include a short abstract addressing what the problem is, why it matters, and why it's hard to solve. 

Examples might include: 

• Major barriers to publishing and disseminating industry research and collaboration

• Structural and practical challenges of industry research dissemination

• Examples of high-impact or large-scale challenges emerging in industry

• Research questions industry wishes academia explored more deeply

• Practical constraints that shape industry work (legal, data access, timelines, deployment realities)

• Types of contributions that are valuable internally but difficult to publish

• Recurring research gaps across games research and development

In this submission, you can indicate whether or not you would like to be considered to be invited to present the problem as a lightning talk. These talks should be short (5-6 min each). 

Note: 

• You do not need to be able to attend CoG in person (or at all) to submit. We want to build as broad a corpus of open problems as possible.

• We will select a small number of submissions for lightning talks during the session, but all submitted problems will be shared with breakout groups and folded into the broader discussion, regardless of whether they're selected as a talk.

• Submissions can continue to be discussed after the session through our community Discord.

Submit a brief abstract of your proposed open problem in the form below. Minimum 600 characters. Submissions are due Friday, August 14, 2026 11:59:59 PM AoE. 

Organizers