Volume 1, Number 1
Call for Papers
Inaugural Edition
The first edition is open across all fifteen subject areas. We are looking for work that has stayed unpublished because no journal was asking for it: the model built for one island, the dataset nobody else holds, the deployment that failed and taught you something.
From the Editor-in-Chief
About This Call
Caribbean researchers have been doing serious machine learning work for years. Very little of it is easy to find. It sits in dissertations, in ministry reports, in conference slides, in repositories with four stars, in the heads of people who moved on to the next contract before they wrote anything up. When a hurricane model or a credit-scoring study does get published, it usually appears in a journal that treated the Caribbean as a case study rather than the point.
This edition is broad by design. A narrow theme in a first edition selects for whoever happened to be working on that topic this year, and we would rather find out what the region is doing. Fifteen subject areas are open. The requirement is that the work uses machine learning or artificial intelligence, and that it is about this region or the small-state conditions we share.
Two further tracks open on the same day. A preprint server, so that work which cannot wait four months for review can be timestamped and read now. And a student section, because there are teenagers in this region building models that deserve a proper reviewer and a proper citation, with almost nowhere to send them.
If you have been sitting on work because no journal seemed to want it, send it here.
Adrian Dunkley
Editor-in-Chief, AIC
The Three Tracks
The inaugural edition accepts work through three routes, each with its own review standard. Choose the one that fits where your work currently stands. Editors move manuscripts between tracks where it helps the author, and will ask you before doing so.
| Track | Review | Deadline | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peer-reviewed articles | Double blind, two or more subject experts | 14 September 2026 | Published in the December 2026 edition, CC BY 4.0 |
| AIC Preprints | Moderation screen for scope and form, not peer review | Rolling, no deadline | Announced within two working days, versioned, permanently citable |
| Student researchers | Mentored review, two reviewers plus a student reader | 14 September 2026 | Published in the student section of the December 2026 edition |
None of the three charges a fee at any stage. The Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Association funds the journal precisely so that no author has to weigh a submission against a budget line.
Topics We Are Seeking
The list below is indicative rather than exhaustive. An open call for "anything about AI in the Caribbean" tends to produce the same four papers, so the gaps are named here specifically. If your work fits the scope but appears nowhere below, send it anyway.
cai.CLM Climate, Weather and Disaster Risk
Downscaled hurricane track and intensity prediction for individual island states. Flood, landslide and storm-surge mapping from satellite and drone imagery. Machine learning for parametric insurance triggers, including basis risk. Coral bleaching and reef health detection. Drought forecasting for water-stressed islands. Post-event damage assessment from imagery. Anything that has been validated against an actual event.
cai.FIN Finance, Insurance and Risk
Credit scoring where most applicants have no credit file. Alternative data underwriting and its fairness properties. Catastrophe and actuarial modelling for small, highly correlated portfolios. Remittance flow forecasting. Anti-money-laundering detection in correspondent banking under de-risking pressure. Pension and capital market modelling in shallow markets where the standard assumptions break.
cai.GOV Public Policy, Governance and Law
Machine learning inside public administration: revenue and customs risk, benefits triage, court backlog analysis, procurement integrity. Legislative and case-law modelling on Commonwealth Caribbean corpora. Evaluation of deployed government AI systems, including the ones that were quietly switched off. Regulatory design for small states that cannot staff a full AI regulator.
cai.SME Small Business, Trade and Informal Economies
Demand forecasting for micro and small enterprises with a few hundred transactions of history. Measuring informal economic activity from satellite, mobility or payments data. Supply chain and logistics optimization across archipelagos. AI adoption studies among small firms, including honest accounting of what it cost and whether it stuck.
cai.INF Infrastructure, Compute and Data Systems
Regional compute strategy and the economics of it. Sovereign and national language models built on open-source foundations. Data governance, interoperability and national data infrastructure. Serving models under low bandwidth, intermittent power and expensive egress. Benchmarks for what actually runs on the hardware institutions here can afford.
cai.MED Health, Medicine and Life Sciences
Diagnostic imaging validated on Caribbean populations rather than transferred untested. Risk models for the non-communicable disease burden the region carries. Outbreak surveillance and vector-borne disease forecasting. Triage and resource allocation in health systems with real capacity limits. Structural biology, natural products and Caribbean biodiversity.
cai.AGR Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Security
Yield, pest and disease prediction for regional crops. Precision irrigation under water scarcity. Fisheries stock assessment and illegal fishing detection. Sargassum influx forecasting, which affects tourism, fisheries and public health at once. Food import dependence and price transmission modelling.
cai.TUR Tourism, Mobility and the Blue Economy
Arrival and demand forecasting, including shocks. Dynamic pricing and revenue management for small operators, not just chains. Cruise and port logistics. Visitor sentiment and review analysis at scale. Marine spatial planning, coastal carrying capacity and the trade-off between arrivals and reef survival.
cai.CUL Language, Culture and Creative Industries
Creole and heritage language technology: corpora, speech recognition, translation, and the question of who owns the data. Dialect and code-switching modelling. Digitization and search across regional archives. The economics of generative media for music, film and design sectors, in either direction.
cai.EDU Education, Skills and the Workforce
Learning analytics on regional examination data. Adaptive tutoring that works in a classroom of forty with intermittent connectivity. Skills and labour market forecasting, including exposure of Caribbean occupations to automation. Migration of trained technical staff. AI literacy curricula and their evaluation.
cai.NRG Energy, Water and Utilities
Grid stability and forecasting under high renewable penetration on small isolated grids. Outage prediction and restoration sequencing after storms. Non-revenue water detection, which in several territories exceeds half of all supply. Microgrid and storage optimization. Energy poverty measurement.
cai.SEC Safety, Security and Border Systems
Crime and violence analytics, and the serious question of what should not be modelled. Road traffic safety. Maritime domain awareness and search and rescue. Border and immigration systems, and their error rates. Disaster response coordination. Cyber defence for institutions with three-person security teams.
cai.MIG Migration, Diaspora and Demography
Migration flow modelling and its drivers. Diaspora investment, remittance networks and knowledge transfer. Population projection for ageing and shrinking populations. Linkage of census and administrative records under privacy constraints.
cai.SOC Ethics, Society and Human Rights
Measured bias in models trained without the region, applied to it anyway. Surveillance, privacy and consent. Labour effects of automation on Caribbean employment structures. Participation, data sovereignty and community consent in research design. AI and reparative justice.
cai.MTH Methods, Benchmarks and Open Datasets
New Caribbean datasets and benchmarks, which the region needs more than it needs another model. Evaluation protocols for low-data regimes. Transfer and domain adaptation studies that test whether models built elsewhere survive contact with local conditions. Replications, including failed ones. Survey and measurement methodology.
Review Criteria
Reviewers score against five criteria, weighted equally. The same form applies in every track, with the student section applying it developmentally. It is published in the review policy.
- Regional relevance. Does the work engage Caribbean or small-state conditions substantively, rather than mentioning them in the introduction?
- Methodological soundness. Are the data, the model, the baselines and the evaluation appropriate, and is the uncertainty honestly reported?
- Contribution. Does this add something that was not already available, whether a result, a dataset, a method or a definitive negative finding?
- Reproducibility. Could a competent reader repeat this from what is written, and are data and code available or their absence explained?
- Clarity. Is it readable by an informed reader outside the immediate speciality, including the policymakers who may have to act on it?
Key Dates
| Stage | Date |
|---|---|
| Call opens | Open now |
| Submissions close | Monday 14 September 2026, 23:59 AST |
| Desk decisions issued | By 28 September 2026 |
| Reviewer reports returned to authors | By 26 October 2026 |
| Revised manuscripts due | 16 November 2026 |
| Final decisions | 30 November 2026 |
| Edition published | December 2026 |
Late submissions are rolled into the next call rather than discarded. If an emergency prevents you from meeting the date, and this region has them, write to the editorial office before the deadline rather than after it.
How to Submit
- Peer-reviewed article: use the manuscript submission form. You need an anonymised manuscript, a separate title page, an abstract of 200 to 300 words, four to eight keywords, and a primary subject code.
- Preprint: use the preprint form. Not anonymised, no deadline, screened rather than reviewed.
- Student submission: use the student form. Your mentor countersigns, and you need a plain-language summary and an AI use statement.
Anything that will not fit through a form goes to submissions@caribbeanaijournal.org. Questions about fit, scope, or whether an idea is worth writing up, go to editor@caribbeanaijournal.org, where an editor answers them.