SACI, IEEE International Symposium on Applied Computational Intelligence and Informatics

About SACI, IEEE International Symposium on Applied Computational Intelligence and Informatics

SACI — IEEE International Symposium on Applied Computational Intelligence and Informatics — Proceedings Profile

SACI, the IEEE International Symposium on Applied Computational Intelligence and Informatics, is not a journal at all, and a useful profile has to start with that fact. It is a recurring international conference, held in Hungary and Romania, whose papers are published as a proceedings series by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The JournalsWorld record for this post (ID 37167) stores the title in exactly that form, stores two identifiers — electronic ISSN 2765-818X and print-on-demand ISSN 2833-9010 — and then misleads in two places: its publisher field holds a bare number instead of an organisation, and its template text calls the title a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published in the United States with coverage spanning only 2025. Every part of that template description needs correcting. The proceedings publisher is IEEE, the organising institutions are Óbuda University in Budapest, Hungary and Politehnica University of Timisoara in Romania, together with the IEEE Chapter of SMC in Romania, and the symposium itself is far older than one year: the edition held in May 2025 was already the nineteenth, and a twentieth jubilee edition has been announced for 2027. This profile sets out what SACI is, how its editions run, what kinds of papers it takes, how review and publication work under IEEE rules, what its indexing actually covers, and how an author prepares a paper for it.

At a Glance

Identity: A Conference Series Wearing a Journal Record

The ISSN pair is the anchor. A bibliographic record for a paper in the 2023 proceedings, held by the University of Birmingham, lists the host publication as the 2023 IEEE 17th International Symposium on Applied Computational Intelligence and Informatics (SACI), the publisher as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the ISSN (Print) as 2833-9010 and the ISSN (Electronic) as 2765-818X. A publication list from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca describing the same 2023 edition gives the pair in the fuller form used by IEEE itself: Electronic ISSN 2765-818X and Print on Demand ISSN 2833-9010, alongside that edition's electronic ISBN 979-8-3503-2110-4 and print-on-demand ISBN 979-8-3503-2111-1. A 2025 proceedings citation gives the same two ISSNs again. So the two numbers on this JournalsWorld record are correct and current, and they belong to a proceedings series: each year's symposium is a volume in the series, identified by its own DOIs under the IEEE prefix 10.1109 and its own ISBNs, while the ISSNs stay constant across editions.

That structure explains several things a journal reader finds strange. There are no monthly or quarterly issues, no volume of articles gathered across a year, and no editor-in-chief in the journal sense. Instead there is an organising committee rebuilt around each edition, track chairs for each subject stream, plenary speakers invited for that year, and a call for papers with a single full-paper deadline, a notification date and a camera-ready date. What looks, in a journal directory, like a very young title with one year of coverage is in fact the latest slice of a long series: the directory record was created from recent bibliographic data, which is why its template text reports coverage spanning 2025 only. The organisers' own pages show editions running back well over a decade before that, as the history section below documents.

It also explains the country confusion. IEEE is an American organisation and its proceedings carry an American publisher imprint, which is how the stored record acquired its United States label. The symposium itself, however, is a Hungarian–Romanian event. Its two host universities are Óbuda University in Budapest and Politehnica University of Timisoara, its regular venues are in Timisoara and in Hungary, and its supporting bodies are the Hungarian and Romanian sections and chapters of IEEE and the Romanian Academy's Timisoara branch and information science section. An author travelling to SACI travels to Hungary or Romania, not to the United States, and a reader citing SACI is citing a European conference whose proceedings an American publisher distributes.

History and Editions

The edition numbering tells the outline of the story. The symposium held in Timisoara on 23–25 May 2013 was the 8th edition, staged at Politehnica University of Timisoara and billed, on its own site, as appearing on the Australian Research Council conference list in class C — a listing the organisers have repeated in later years. By 2018 the event had reached its 12th edition, held on 17–19 May 2018 at the Faculty of Automation and Computing in Timisoara, where the host university reports 108 scientific papers presented, more than 300 specialists attending from twenty countries across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa, and 22 sessions. That 2018 meeting also saw the Timisoara senate award honorary doctorates during the symposium, a sign of how firmly the event is woven into the host university's calendar.

The 13th edition followed on 29 May 2019 in Timisoara, with 68 papers, more than 100 specialists from twenty countries, 16 sessions and four plenary sessions given by speakers from the USA, South Korea, Serbia and Hungary, according to the host university's report. The series continued through the pandemic years and re-emerged in person: the 17th edition, SACI 2023, ran on 23–26 May 2023 at the UPT Central Library in Timisoara, hosted by the Faculty of Automation and Computing, with full papers due on 24 February 2023, notification on 28 March and final papers on 25 April. The 18th edition, SACI 2024, ran on 21–25 May 2024 across two venues — the Hotel Azúr at Siófok on Lake Balaton in Hungary and the Conference Center of Politehnica University of Timisoara — with a full-paper deadline of 26 February 2024, notification on 26 March and final papers on 23 April. The 19th edition, SACI 2025, was held on 19–24 May 2025 in Budapest and Timisoara. Looking ahead, the call circulated for SACI 2027 presents it as the 20th jubilee edition, to be held on 24–29 May 2027 in Hungary and Timisoara, in person with onsite presentations only. Whether a separate 2026 edition sits between the 19th and the announced jubilee edition could not be verified from the sources checked for this profile, and readers should check the Óbuda conference site for the current call rather than rely on the numbering alone.

One human thread runs through the modern series. SACI 2024 was dedicated to the 75th birthday of Professor Imre J. Rudas, the Hungarian engineering professor closely associated with Óbuda University and with this conference community, and the 2024 programme included a special publication honouring him on advanced intelligent robotics and autonomous control systems. The dedication matters for identity: SACI is not an anonymous commercial conference brand. It is the meeting of a specific Central European research community in computational intelligence, built around Óbuda and Timisoara, which IEEE sponsorship then carries to an international audience.

Scope and Tracks

The organisers describe the aim in one sentence: the conference focuses on theory and application in the field of applied computational intelligence and informatics, and aims to provide a platform for scientists, teachers, researchers and students to publish their papers. The track structure shows what that means in practice. For SACI 2024 the named tracks were Computational Intelligence, Intelligent Mechatronics, Systems Engineering, Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, Intelligent Robotics, and Informatics, each with a named track chair drawn from the Hungarian and Romanian community and beyond. Around those core tracks sat special sessions on 5G and cybersecurity, on digitalisation, generation research and consumer trends, and on nonlinear mathematical problems, theory and applications. The 2025 and 2027 calls keep the same six core tracks and add their own special sessions — the 2027 call, for example, adds a special session on PhD student research in applied informatics and numerical mathematics.

Read as a scope statement, the track list covers fuzzy systems, neural and evolutionary methods and other computational intelligence techniques; mechatronics and intelligent control; robotics, including medical and service robotics in the community around the robotics track chair; manufacturing systems and industrial informatics; and the informatics foundations — modelling, software and data — that support them. The older 2013 topic list was more granular still, naming genetic, neural and fuzzy algorithms, expert systems, intelligent control, information technology in biomedicine and advanced informatics applications. A paper fits SACI when its centre of gravity is a computational intelligence method applied to a real system, or an informatics contribution in that applied spirit. Purely theoretical work with no application pull, and general computer science with no intelligence or systems angle, will usually find a better home in a more specialised venue — a judgement the track chairs make at review.

Organisers, Sponsors and People

The 2024 edition page gives the fullest public picture of the machine behind the symposium. The organisers are Óbuda University in Budapest, Politehnica University of Timisoara, and the IEEE Chapter of SMC in Romania. The sponsors are the IEEE Hungary Section, the IEEE Chapter of SMC in Hungary, the IEEE Joint Chapter of IES and RAS in Hungary, and the IEEE Control Systems Chapter in Hungary. The technical co-sponsor is the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society — the society whose initials, SMC, recur in the chapter names. The event works in technical cooperation with the IEEE Romania Section, the Romanian Academy's Section of Information Sciences and Technology, the Academy of Technical Sciences of Romania (ASTR), the Romanian Academy's Timisoara Branch, and the Hungarian Fuzzy Association, and it lists industrial partners including Accenture, ATOSS, Continental, Hella, Krohne, Lives and Nokia.

Plenary talks anchor each programme. SACI 2024 heard Hamido Fujita of Iwate Prefectural University in Japan on views on artificial intelligence and machine learning, Haibin Zhu of Nipissing University in Canada on E-CARGO and role-based collaboration, Nikos Mastorakis of the Technical University of Sofia in Bulgaria on spread-spectrum modulation combined with AI for jamming-resistant communication, and Mihai Udrescu of Politehnica University of Timisoara on hybrid classical–quantum systems. SACI 2023's advertised plenary speakers included Nikola Kasabov, on neuroinformatics, neural networks and neurocomputers for brain-inspired computational intelligence, and Dana Petcu. Track chairs in recent calls include Amir Mosavi for computational intelligence, Radu-Emil Precup for intelligent mechatronics, László Horváth for intelligent manufacturing systems and the PhD special session, Tamás Haidegger for intelligent robotics, and Levente Kovács with Dániel András Drexler for informatics. These names are given here as they appear on the organisers' own pages for the editions cited; committees change from edition to edition, and the current call is the authoritative list for any given year.

Peer Review and the IEEE Publication Rules

SACI papers are peer reviewed as conference papers, and the publication bargain is the standard IEEE one, stated plainly on the organisers' pages. Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished papers. Conference proceedings that meet IEEE quality review standards may be eligible for inclusion in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. IEEE reserves the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the conference — for example, by removal from IEEE Xplore — if the paper is not presented at the conference. In the organisers' own words, pay to publish is not allowed by IEEE, so at least one author of a paper must show up and present it. Recent editions underline the point by running in person with onsite presentations only.

For an author, three practical consequences follow. First, acceptance is not the finish line: an accepted paper whose authors do not attend and present can be kept out of Xplore, which is where the paper's citable life would otherwise happen. Second, the timetable is compressed and fixed — for 2024, roughly a month from full paper to notification and a further month to the final paper — so the submitted version needs to be close to final. Third, because the venue alternates and sometimes splits across two cities in two countries in the same week, authors should confirm the venue and session location for their own presentation from the current edition's programme before booking travel. None of these rules is unusual for an IEEE symposium, but each is different from journal practice, and each has caught out authors who treated a conference acceptance like a journal acceptance.

Indexing and Metrics — What Is, and Is Not, Claimed

The organisers state the indexing position directly. The SACI 2024 page says the conference proceedings is available via IEEE Xplore and that papers are indexed by Scopus and Web of Science. The Timisoara host page for SACI 2023 says the proceedings of previous editions are indexed in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (under its former ISI Proceedings naming), as well as in IEEE Xplore and Inspec and in Scopus and DBLP; the university's report on the 2019 edition likewise lists Scopus, IEEE Xplore, DBLP and Inspec, and describes the Web of Science indexing of editions from 2007 and 2009 and 2013–2018. Those are organiser and host statements about the series, repeated here with that attribution; indexing of any single edition is confirmed only when that edition's papers appear in the service in question, and authors who need indexing for an evaluation should verify their own paper in Scopus or Web of Science after the edition closes.

What SACI does not have is just as important, because journal-style directories keep trying to give it journal furniture. It has no Journal Impact Factor, because that measure belongs to journals in Journal Citation Reports and SACI is a proceedings series. It has no article processing charge in the journal sense; any costs are conference registration costs for a specific edition, and the fee schedule for a future edition could not be verified from the sources checked for this profile — the current call for papers is the place to find it. The stored template's claim of an H-index of 1 could not be verified against an authoritative source at checking time and should not be relied on: a single h-index figure for a twenty-edition proceedings series depends entirely on which database slice produced it. An OpenAlex look-up by ISSN returned no source record for either ISSN at checking time, so OpenAlex works and citation figures for SACI are reported here as could not be verified rather than guessed from other databases. A DOAJ search for the electronic ISSN likewise returned no record, which is expected — DOAJ lists journals, not conference proceedings — and no DOAJ listing is claimed.

How to Submit a Paper

Submission runs through the current edition's pages on the Óbuda University conference site, which follow a stable pattern. Watch for the call for the next edition, note its three dates — full paper submission, notification, and final paper submission — and prepare an original, unpublished full paper that fits one of the named tracks or special sessions. Write it to the IEEE proceedings format for that edition, keep it within the edition's page rules as published in its call (the page limit for a future edition is not published in the sources checked here and must be taken from that call), and submit through the route the call specifies before the full-paper deadline. If the paper is accepted, act on the reviewers' points, send the final version by the camera-ready date, register, and present the paper in person at the venue and session assigned in the programme; presentation is a condition of the paper staying in the proceedings and reaching IEEE Xplore. Authors who cannot travel should settle that question before submitting, not after acceptance, because the no-show rule is applied by IEEE rather than waived by the local organisers.

Similar and Easily Confused Titles

SACI sits in a family of Óbuda-centred IEEE meetings, and the closest confusion risk is with its siblings rather than with journals. The World Symposium on Applied Machine Intelligence and Informatics (SAMI), run by the same Budapest–Slovak–Romanian community, covers overlapping ground in machine intelligence, and authors in this field routinely weigh SACI against SAMI and against Óbuda's conferences on intelligent engineering systems and on computational intelligence and informatics. Further afield, the IEEE Region 10 conference TENCON, the IEEE AFRICON conference and other regional IEEE flagships publish proceedings in the same Xplore-and-Scopus pattern but serve different regions and communities. Within JournalsWorld itself, titles such as the Proceedings of the International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics and Communications in Computer and Information Science are proceedings or series records of the same broad kind. None of these is SACI: the safe test is always the identifier pair 2765-818X and 2833-9010 together with the Óbuda and Timisoara organisers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is SACI a journal? No. It is the IEEE International Symposium on Applied Computational Intelligence and Informatics, a recurring conference. The record described here is its proceedings series, which is why it carries ISSNs — serial identifiers — without being a journal.

What are SACI's ISSNs? Electronic ISSN 2765-818X and print-on-demand ISSN 2833-9010. Both appear on bibliographic records for the 2023 proceedings and again on 2025 proceedings citations checked for this profile.

Who organises SACI and where is it held? Óbuda University (Budapest, Hungary), Politehnica University of Timisoara (Romania) and the IEEE Chapter of SMC in Romania. Recent editions have been held in Timisoara and in Hungary — Siófok in 2024 and Budapest in 2025 — and the announced 2027 jubilee edition is planned for Hungary and Timisoara.

Are SACI papers indexed? The organisers state that proceedings are available via IEEE Xplore and that papers are indexed by Scopus and Web of Science; host pages for earlier editions also name Inspec and DBLP. Verify your own paper in the service you care about after your edition, because organiser statements describe the series.

Does SACI have an impact factor or an article processing charge? No journal impact factor applies to a proceedings series. There is no journal-style article charge; the relevant cost is the registration fee for the specific edition, which must be taken from that edition's call — it could not be verified for a future edition from the sources checked here.

What happens if I do not attend? Under the IEEE rules quoted by the organisers, a paper not presented at the conference can be excluded from distribution, including removal from IEEE Xplore. At least one author must present the paper in person.

How old is SACI? Older than its directory record suggests. The 2013 meeting was the 8th edition, the 2025 meeting the 19th, and a 20th jubilee edition has been announced for May 2027.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile was built from the organisers' and hosts' own pages and from bibliographic records for the proceedings: the SACI 2024 and SACI 2013 sites on the Óbuda University conference domain (organisers, sponsors, tracks, schedule, IEEE publication rules and indexing statements), Óbuda University's SACI 2025 event page, Politehnica University of Timisoara reports on the 2018, 2019 and 2023 editions (edition numbers, dates, paper and attendance counts, indexing statements), the University of Birmingham's record for a SACI 2023 paper and a Technical University of Cluj-Napoca publication list (ISSN and ISBN pairings), and the call circulated for SACI 2027 (jubilee edition, dates and tracks). Database checks at the time of writing: OpenAlex returned no source for either ISSN, and a DOAJ search for the electronic ISSN returned no record; both results are reported in the text rather than filled in from secondary sites. Figures and dates are attributed to their sources in the text, and anything that could not be verified from a fetched source is marked as such.