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What the ICML 2026 Communications Chairs Were Up To

By ICML 2026 Communications Chairs, Gautam Kamath, Katherine Gorman, and Tegan Emerson

We hope you enjoyed ICML 2026! Now that the conference is over, we wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what the communications chairs have been doing over the course of the last year. This involved helping with all public communications (on, e.g., the blog and social media), as well as coordinating with many members of the press who were present at the conference. 

At the start of this conference cycle, we agreed on a fundamental philosophy of transparency and openness. Things are changing quickly in machine learning research, which requires significant measures to adapt to. We believe that everyone should understand what decisions are being made, and why. While not everyone will agree with every decision made, hopefully all will see that these are the outcome of very thorough and thoughtful processes by those making the decisions, and not just random choices. 

Blog

This year, ICML joined its sister conferences (NeurIPS and ICLR) in having an official blog. For all significant updates and announcements, the blog was intended to be the definitive source. Before the submission deadline, this focused around communicating and explaining the changes to the peer review process, including the LLM-use policy and other policies. During the review process, it was used to communicate about violations of the LLM-use policy and findings regarding the AI Paper Assistant Tool. Other posts included announcements about workshops, tutorials, socials, and paper awards. These posts generally included not only the selections, but also a behind-the-scenes look at the selection process itself. 

Most of the posts were written by or in collaboration with the chairs of various components of the conference. We appreciate their willingness to help communicate details of their work and contribute to a culture of openness within the machine learning community. 

Social Media

Our social media approach for ICML 2026 spanned three different platforms:

ICML also has a Facebook account (icml.imls) with a sizable number of followers (18K). Unfortunately, we are unable to access this account because we do not know who has the credentials. If you work at Meta or otherwise can help recover this account, please be in touch!

The machine learning community is very broad, from academia to industry, covering every continent (except Antarctica!). Our primary goal was to meet the community wherever it prefers to consume content. Consequently, while engagement varied significantly across the different sites, we considered cross-posting to be worth the effort: it was largely a copy-paste job, though some work was needed to adapt tags and character limits. 

At a high level, one of our goals was to track the discussion surrounding ICML and make sure we’re providing timely and accurate information directly from the official source. Many posts were done hand-in-hand with the program chairs. Every major announcement on the blog was accompanied by a social media post to publicize it, though the majority of posts were for less significant matters. This includes smaller announcements and updates, e.g., the number of submissions, addressing reactions to prompt watermarks, etc., that were posted exclusively on social media. Around submission and notification deadlines, posts were more lighthearted (jokes, memes, etc.). An effort was also made to boost announcements by organizers of official ICML events, e.g., Calls for Papers for ICML workshops. During the conference, we shared pictures of the venue and various talks, to help bring the conference home to people who couldn’t make it there in person (…or induce FOMO…). 

A notable omission was social media coverage on platforms outside the Anglosphere. Future communications chairs could mirror content on social media popular in other countries. Is there somewhere that ICML doesn’t have a presence that you think it should? Please let us know!

Here’s some follower numbers and growth from our tenure as chairs (from roughly September 1, 2025 to today):

  • Twitter/X grew to 87,433 followers. 
  • Bluesky grew from ~850 followers to 1,259 (+409).
  • LinkedIn grew from 11,651 followers to 25,842 followers (+14,191), more than doubling in size.

Interviews and Video Content

This year in Seoul, we managed to sit down with the program chairs and most of the invited speakers. This allowed us to get more intimate and personal content out of these folks, through podcast-style conversations. These interviews are still being edited and processed and will be posted in the coming weeks, on social media and the official ICML Youtube channel (@ICMLconf) — be sure to subscribe to not miss out!

In future years, ambitious communications chairs could feature more interviews or video content, posted live during the conference: person-on-the-street style interviews with attendees could bring parts of the conference to people who couldn’t make it there in person. 

Press

A complementary role involved coordination with members of the press: this includes selecting which individuals and organizations receive press credentials, helping them navigate our community, and ensuring their presence enhances the event and communications about it. 

This year, roughly 30 journalists representing over a dozen outlets received press credentials for ICML 2026. Since the conference was held in Korea, this included several significant regional news outlets (e.g., Korea Economic Daily, Maeil Business Newspaper, Nikkei), as well as international publications (e.g., MIT Technology Review, The Information, Hindustan Times, Science, and Nature). Beyond traditional publications, there were also a number of independent and new media journalists, focusing more on channels including YouTube and Telegram.

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