Call for Articles: SERC Special Issue of INCOSE INSIGHT
INCOSE INSIGHT, June 2026
A Decade of AI and Systems Engineering: Looking Back and Forward
- An invited article series – INCOSE membership not required
- A joint project of INCOSE and the Systems Engineering Research Center
In March of 2020, INCOSE and the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) published a special issue of INSIGHT magazine titled AI and Systems Engineering. This special issue became the all-time most downloaded issue of INSIGHT. In September 2020, SERC and the United States Army hosted their first AI4SE & SE4AI Research and Application Workshop, which has continued to become an annual event.
The two-day workshop in 2025 was attended in-person and virtually by more than 250 people representing government and military, academia, industry, University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs), and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). In this new special INSIGHT issue, INCOSE and SERC will look back at six years of impactful progress in the AI4SE & SE4AI domain, and look forward to the next four years of promises, predictions, and challenges.
Mission
The focus of the articles in this special issue is to trace the progress of AI and automation in SE methods, processes, tools, and applications across the decade from 2020, when the first special issue was published, to 2030, when we might look back at the past decade. Articles should show continual advancement of either application of AI technologies to systems engineering practice, or evolution of systems engineering practice to address the rapid growth of AI enabled systems.
Approach
Due to the short publication window, this themed Issue is limited to members of the SERC research network or past presenters at an AI4SE & SE4AI workshop. Please respond to the theme editors with your intent to submit a full article by February 23, 2026.
Send submissions to both Theme Editors Zoe Szajnfarber (zszajnfa@gwu.edu) and Tom McDermott (tmcdermo@stevens.edu).
Schedule
- February 6: Call for articles issued
- February 23: Email due to theme editors with intent to submit, including a working title, one page working abstract, and summary of previous presented work
- February 27: Selection and notification of invited articles
- March 23: First draft full article submission
- April 15: Final draft submission, formatted for required style, with author-company release
- May: INSIGHT editors may contact authors directly with copy-editing suggestions
- June: INSIGHT publication
General Guidance
- These are not journal articles, 2000-4000 words is the target. Use a writing and presentation style that targets practitioners.
- Do not use the MS Word reference tool. Citations and references should comply with the Chicago Manual of Style, including citations and references. A descriptive guide with examples is linked below.
- Graphics are highly encouraged and do not take away from word-count.
- Submit in MS Word. PDF submissions will not be accepted.
- INCOSE requires each author to submit either the general release or government release INCOSE IP form with the article. The two alternative IP forms are also below.
INCOSE Author Intellectual Property Agreement and Release for Materials Form
INCOSE Government Intellectual Property Release for Materials Form
Submissions
Send full article submissions to both Theme Editors Zoe Szajnfarber (zszajnfa@gwu.edu) and Tom McDermott (tmcdermo@stevens.edu), attached as an MS Word document. Be sure to include a title, author name(s), and email address(es) in the by-line underneath the article title. Also, include short author bios.