Carlos Guedes, Kaustuv Ganguli, Associate Professor of Computational Sciences at Zayed University, and Gus Xia, Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Mohammed Bin Zayed University for Artificial Intelligence, won the bid for the organization of the conference of the Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) in Abu Dhabi in 2026. The announcement took place at the ISMIR 2024 conference in San Francisco, USA. This conference is the flagship conference in music and artificial intelligence worldwide, having as sponsors large corporations such as Adobe, Google, Spotify and Apple among others and counts more than 500 delegates. This bid has the support of Abu Dhabi UNESCO Creative City of Music, and the conference will be held at the Cultural Foundation in the fall of 2026. 

Form Left to Right: Dr. Kaustuv Ganguli (ZU), Dr. Gus Xia (MBZUAI), and Dr. Carlos Guedes after announcing ISMIR 2026 in Abu Dhabi at ISMIR 2024