4th Workshop on Automated Spatial and Temporal Anomaly Detection (ASTAD)

iSMART Lab and AAAI-27, Montréal

Overview


ASTAD brings together researchers and practitioners working on AI methods for detecting, predicting, explaining, and responding to anomalies, abnormalities, outliers, risks, failures, and deviations from expected or learned normal behavior across spatial, temporal, and multimodal data. The workshop welcomes methodological advances as well as real-world applications in industry, IT systems, finance, healthcare, and beyond, spanning anomaly detection and prediction, out-of-distribution and outlier detection, fraud detection, predictive maintenance, risk analysis and assessment, fault and failure detection/prediction, accident and incident detection/prediction, early warning systems, and abnormal behavior recognition.

Call for Papers


We invite researchers and practitioners to submit their original research contributions to the 4th Workshop on Automated Spatial and Temporal Anomaly Detection (ASTAD), held as part of AAAI-27. Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Anomaly, abnormality, novelty, outlier, and out-of-distribution detection
  • Anomaly and abnormal-event prediction / forecasting
  • Predictive maintenance, fault diagnosis, and failure prediction in industrial and IT systems
  • Risk analysis, risk prediction, and early-warning systems in healthcare, finance, and infrastructure
  • Fraud detection and financial anomaly detection
  • Accident, incident, and hazard detection and prediction
  • Detection and prediction of deviations from expected or learned normal behavior
  • Root-cause analysis, diagnosis, localization, and attribution across clinical, industrial, and IT settings
  • Foundation models, LLMs, VLMs, and generalist models for detection and prediction
  • Agentic AI for monitoring, diagnosis, prediction, and autonomous response
  • Generative, self-supervised, unsupervised, few-shot, and zero-shot approaches
  • Explainable, interpretable, causal, and reasoning-based methods
  • Multimodal, spatial, temporal, spatiotemporal, graph, image, video, signal, and tabular data
  • Real-time, streaming, continual, and on-device methods
  • Datasets, benchmarks, evaluation, uncertainty, robustness, and distribution shift
  • Applications in healthcare, manufacturing, IT operations, automotive, transportation, robotics, cybersecurity, remote sensing, infrastructure, energy, finance, and safety-critical systems

Submission Requirements

We welcome original research as full papers of up to 7 pages, plus 2 additional pages for references only. Submissions must use the official AAAI-27 author kit and will undergo double-blind peer review.

All submissions will be handled electronically via OpenReview. Only PDF files are accepted.

Submission Site: OpenReview

Format


ASTAD is a one-day event combining paper presentations, invited talks from leading researchers, and interactive poster sessions, with ample time for Q&A and discussion.

Attendance


Attendance is open to all registered AAAI-27 participants, including researchers, students, and industry professionals.

Important Dates


  • Paper submission deadline: November 20, 2026
  • Author notification: December 2, 2026
  • Camera-ready deadline: To be announced
  • Workshop Date: February 22–23, 2027
  • Workshop Location: Montréal, Canada

Schedule


The workshop schedule will be announced soon.

Speakers


Keynote speakers will be announced soon.

Workshop Poster


Organizers


Narges Armanfard (Chair)

Associate Professor - narges.armanfard@mcgill.ca

Narges Armanfard is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University and Mila - Quebec AI Institute. She is also affiliated with McGill Centre for Intelligent Machines (CIM), McGill initiative in Computational Medicine (MiCM) and McGill Institute for Aerospace Engineering (MIAE). Dr. Armanfard is the founder and principal investigator of the iSMART Lab with the mission to pioneer advanced algorithms in artificial intelligence, with expertise in computer vision, time series analysis, tabular data, large language models, and visual language models.

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Thi Kieu Khanh Ho

AI Researcher (Postdoctoral; Lab member since 2021) - thi.k.ho@mail.mcgill.ca

Khanh received her PhD degree in AI at McGill University and her Master’s degree at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), South Korea. She was a researcher at Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH), South Korea, before moving to Montreal for her PhD. She has received the prestigious McGill Engineering Doctoral Award (MEDA), the GREAT Award, and the highly prestigious Vanier Scholarship and Chwang Seto Award. Her research focuses on time-series data analysis using generative models and graphs.

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Thomas Lai

AI Researcher (PhD; Lab member since 2023) - thomas.lai@mail.mcgill.ca

Thomas is a PhD student at the iSMART Lab, McGill University and Mila - Quebec AI Institute. He received his B.Eng. in Bioengineering from McGill University. His research develops deep learning algorithms and foundation models for time-series analysis, with a focus on open-set anomaly detection, with work published at ECAI. He also works on applications in brain signal analysis and industrial automation, and is co-first author of EpiiSLM, developed with clinical collaborators at the MNI. He has received the NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship–Doctoral (PGS-D) and the Vadasz Fellowship. He was a co-organizer of the ASTAD workshop at WACV 2025.

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