The Love and Sex with Robots Academic Congress is accepting abstract submissions for its 2026 edition, scheduled for August 21-23 at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). For a field that mainstream academia has historically treated like an embarrassing relative at a family dinner, the fact that it’s still running, and at a well-regarded university, says something about how far human-robot intimacy research has traveled as a serious scholarly discipline.
The event will take place at UQAM’s Pavillon J.A. DeSève in Montreal’s Latin Quarter. The call for abstracts spans a broad range of disciplines, which could be genuine intellectual ambition or a pragmatic attempt to fill a program. Or possibly both.
The breadth matters because the research questions genuinely aren’t trivial. The gap between what AI companion platforms and sex robot manufacturers claim their products can do and what they actually deliver is, by any honest assessment, enormous.
We’ve tracked that gap closely, from Realbotix’s pivot away from sex robots toward “intimate friendship” AI to the corporate restructuring that split the RealDoll brand from Realbotix entirely as the company moved toward a NASDAQ listing. Those are commercial decisions, but they carry real implications for research, and for the people actually buying these products.
The ethics dimensions are equally unresolved. Chinese humanoid robots are being given female body forms on the premise that it makes them more “intimate”, which is exactly the kind of design assumption that deserves sociological and feminist scrutiny rather than just a product spec sheet.
Academic conferences that can draw together roboticists, sexologists, and ethicists in the same room (or at least the same program) are one of the few venues where that scrutiny can happen in any structured way.
The congress has also made a point of running a bilingual program, with French-language topic categories listed alongside the English ones, which makes sense given the Montreal setting and the conference’s Canadian institutional host.
One of the announced keynote speakers is Charlotte Poitras, a screen performer who specializes in nudity and intimate scenes, and whose IMDb lists her in a minor role in a movie called The Voyeurs, starring Sydney Sweeney.
She may seem a curious choice for a keynote speaker at a conference focused on sex with robots, but Poitras has reportedly been vocal about the intricacies of consent and the psychology of sex in the film industry, so there’s obvious common ground in these deeper issues, and in this case from a different perspective.
The other two keynote speakers are Ellen Kaufman, a sexuality and technology researcher at the Kinsey Institute, and Valérie A. Lapointe, a psychology PhD candidate at UQAM.
Kaufman researches how humans and artificial or virtual partners interact, and how intimacy works between them. She’s had work published in journals including Psychology & Sexuality and the Journal of Sex Research.
Lapointe’s research topics have included AI porn, VR therapy for sexual dysfunction, virtual erotica and AI dating apps.
Organizers are accepting abstracts for both talks and workshops. Teledildonics, VR and AR, AI companions and adult chatbots, and what the organizers call “intelligent electronic adult hardware” are some of the sextech subjects they said could be featured, with the submission deadline set for April 30. Abstract submission details are on the Love & Sex With Robots site.
The potential for confusion
The congress is overseen by David Levy, an AI expert and author of the 2007 book Love & Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, the text that, for better or worse, became the founding document of this entire academic subfield.
Anyone searching for the conference title online may also encounter a rival event: the International Conference on Love and Sex With Robots, announced for Shaoxing, China on June 24-26. That one comes with its own backstory, which we’ve covered separately in the past.
To our knowledge the Canadian event is the only conference of the two that’s secured a speaker who’s appeared in a film with Sydney Sweeney, so that’s a win of sorts.
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