Where Computer Science Conferences Actually Happen
Ask a room of researchers where computer science conferences happen and most will say the United States, then hedge toward “Europe, sometimes.” That intuition is half right, and the half that is wrong turns out to matter if you are planning a submission calendar or a travel budget.
We track conference editions by city, venue, and year, so we ran the numbers on our own dataset to see where the field actually meets.
What is in the dataset
346 conference editions across 258 distinct conference series, spanning 2023 to 2027, held in 49 countries. 344 of those editions have a city we can place on a map.
Two caveats worth stating before any of the numbers below. First, this is a curated set, not a census of every computer science conference on earth. It skews toward established, CORE-ranked venues and the larger industry events, so treat it as a picture of the conferences researchers actually plan trips around rather than a complete survey. Second, it counts editions, not attendees. A 15,000-person conference and a 120-person workshop each count once.
By CORE rank the set breaks down as 95 A*, 103 A, 43 B, 7 C, and 98 unranked, the last group being mostly industry events that CORE does not assess. If you are unsure what those tiers mean, we wrote a separate explainer on CORE rankings.
Europe hosts the most conferences. North America hosts the biggest ones.
Here is the split across all 344 placed editions:
| Region | Editions | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Europe | 138 | 40.1% |
| North America | 122 | 35.5% |
| Asia | 55 | 16.0% |
| Australia | 12 | 3.5% |
| Middle East | 6 | 1.7% |
| South America | 6 | 1.7% |
| Africa | 5 | 1.5% |
Europe comes out ahead, which surprises people who assume the field is American by default. But filter to A* venues only and the ordering inverts:
| Region | A* editions | Share of A* |
|---|---|---|
| North America | 36 | 37.9% |
| Europe | 27 | 28.4% |
| Asia | 21 | 22.1% |
| Australia | 6 | 6.3% |
| South America | 3 | 3.2% |
| Middle East | 2 | 2.1% |
Europe drops close to twelve percentage points when you restrict to the top tier. That is the single largest gap in the data. Europe hosts a great many conferences, but a smaller proportion of them are flagship venues, partly because the region also hosts a long tail of regional and mid-tier meetings that inflate its overall count.
The United States is the interesting non-story here. It accounts for 30.8% of all editions and 31.6% of A* editions, which is almost exactly flat. The US is not disproportionately top tier. It is simply the largest single host country by a wide margin, with 106 editions to Portugal’s 17 in second place.
Asia punches above its weight at the top
Asia is 16.0% of all editions but 22.1% of A* ones. That is a six point jump, the largest positive gap of any region, and it is not concentrated in one country. The 21 A* editions in Asia are spread across Singapore, Bangkok, Shanghai, Suzhou, Busan, Taipei, Jeju, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shenyang, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Bangalore.
Look at which flagship venues those are and the pattern is clear: AAAI 2026 in Singapore, ICML 2026 in Seoul, KDD 2026 on Jeju, SIGMOD 2026 in Bangalore, ICCV 2027 in Hong Kong, NDSS 2027 in Seoul. The biggest names in machine learning, data mining, databases, vision, and security have all scheduled Asian editions inside a two-year window.
If your mental model of the field still has Asia as an occasional destination, it is a few years out of date.
The most common host cities, and why the top one is misleading
| City | Editions | Distinct series |
|---|---|---|
| Lisbon, Portugal | 13 | 12 |
| San Francisco, United States | 11 | 9 |
| Seoul, South Korea | 8 | 8 |
| Las Vegas, United States | 8 | 6 |
| Montreal, Canada | 8 | 8 |
| Barcelona, Spain | 7 | 6 |
| Dublin, Ireland | 6 | 6 |
| Hong Kong | 6 | 6 |
| Sydney, Australia | 6 | 6 |
| Seattle, United States | 6 | 6 |
Lisbon tops the table, but not because it is the busiest conference city in computer science. Ten of its thirteen editions are FLoC 2026, the Federated Logic Conference, which bundles CAV, LICS, SAT, KR, CP, ICLP, FSCD, IJCAR, ITP, and CSF onto one campus at ISCTE within a few weeks in July 2026. Strip out that one federated event and Lisbon has three independent conferences, the same as many cities further down the list.
That makes San Francisco the genuine recurring leader, and it points at something more useful than the raw ranking: co-location is a real force in how the field schedules itself. FLoC does it for logic every four years, and the effect on a city is dramatic. If you work in verification or automated reasoning, one trip in July 2026 covers most of your field’s calendar.
For flagship venues specifically, the leaders are Dublin, Montreal, and Lisbon at four A* editions each, then Rio de Janeiro, Melbourne, San Diego, Seoul, Sydney, and Seattle at three.
Most conferences move, so do not assume last year’s city
Of the 83 conference series in our data with more than one edition, 72 changed city between editions and only 11 stayed put. Roughly seven in eight move.
This sounds obvious stated plainly, but it is the assumption that quietly wrecks travel budgets. A series that met in Vancouver last year may be in Seoul next year, with a very different flight cost, visa requirement, and hotel market. ACL and ICDM each appear in four different cities across four editions in our data.
The practical version: check the city before you check the deadline, because the city determines whether you need to start a visa application before you start writing.
When conferences happen
Month by month, across every edition with a confirmed date:
| Month | Editions |
|---|---|
| October | 45 |
| June | 42 |
| July | 42 |
| November | 33 |
| May | 30 |
| December | 28 |
| March | 27 |
| August | 22 |
| April | 21 |
| February | 18 |
| September | 18 |
| January | 12 |
There are two peaks, an early summer one in June and July and a larger autumn one in October and November, with a deep trough in January. October alone carries almost four times the load of January.
That shape has a direct consequence. If your work fits several venues, the autumn cluster means competing deadlines land in spring, and the summer cluster means competing deadlines land in late autumn. Our deadlines page lists what is currently open, sorted by what closes soonest.
It also means hotel demand around venue districts spikes in the same two windows every year, which is the real argument for booking early rather than any particular conference being unusually busy.
What this is good for
Three things worth taking away.
If you are choosing where to submit and travel cost is a factor, the geography is more balanced than the reputation suggests. Europe and Asia between them host more than half the field, and Asia’s share of flagship venues is growing.
If you are planning a year, look at the October and June-July peaks first, because that is where the collisions happen, both for your calendar and for hotel prices.
And if you are budgeting, assume the conference will move. Seven in eight of them do. Our guide to what a conference trip actually costs breaks down the difference between a domestic and an international trip, and the gap is large enough that guessing wrong about the continent can double the number.
We update this dataset continuously as venues are announced, so these proportions will shift. The direction of travel, though, has been steady for a while: more of the field’s flagship events are meeting outside North America and Europe than the field’s own mental map tends to assume.