NINeS 2027: Call for Papers

The second edition of the New Ideas In Networked Systems (NINeS) conference will be a one-day online event on February 16, 2027, with submissions due on August 6, 2026.

As its name suggests, the purpose of NINeS is to give exposure to new ideas that can help shape the future of networked systems. But all conferences seek out new ideas, so what makes NINeS special? NINeS is less concerned with the detailed evaluation of ideas than with their conceptual daring and intellectual novelty. Moreover, NINeS takes an unusually broad view of how papers can help shape the future of networked systems. For instance, papers can shape the future by describing a vision of how systems could be designed differently, even if such designs are incompatible with the current ecosystem’s infrastructure and/or incentives. The future can also be shaped by retrospectives that explain why past designs failed or succeeded. More generally (but this is not an exhaustive list), such future-relevant papers could identify fundamental open questions, debunk current practices, or report on network measurements that identify unusual phenomena. Thus, not all papers need to provide a detailed technical design that solves a narrowly defined problem; our ambit, and our ambition, is far broader than this.

While NINeS is open to a wide variety of topics and approaches, we expect that all submissions will:

• Motivate why we should care about the problem or topic being addressed, and be written so that the core idea can be understood by most researchers working in the area of networked systems. This is to ensure that the paper is accessible to all conference attendees, not just experts in the paper’s specific topic.
• Demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of the approach through well-reasoned arguments, analytical/formal models, and/or experimental evaluation, but practical deployment is neither required nor expected.

To ensure that the reviewing load on the PC remains reasonable, the PC chairs may desk-reject papers which clearly do not fit these criteria or which address topics that the PC is unable to review with adequate expertise.

The proceedings and the conference

All accepted papers will appear in the NINeS proceedings which will be archived in OASIcs. Similar to last year, the conference will not be a traditional centralized in-person meeting. Instead, NINeS will be global and decentralized, with the conference day involving several activities — both online and in local pods — to stimulate discussion among attendees, including keynotes, panels, and mentoring sessions. Importantly, the conference activities will not involve live presentations of papers. Instead, we will post recorded talk videos online where they can be watched on demand.

However, this on-demand viewing of talks did not generate sufficient interactions between authors and viewers. To rectify this, for NINeS 2027 we are formulating plans for an online seminar series in which, over a period of weeks or months (either before or after the conference day), every paper is presented live. This removes the pressure of packing a large number of talks into a single day, and gives each paper a chance to reach a global audience in a time-relaxed and interactive setting where the audience has a chance to more deeply explore the topic. Additional details on this evolving plan will be made available in the months to come.

What to Submit

Submissions can be up to 12 pages in length, and must be in two-column format, using 10-point type on 12-point (single-spaced) leading, in a text block 7” wide x 9” deep, with 0.33” inter-column space, formatted for 8.5” x 11” paper. References and appendices do not count towards the 12-page limit, and additional pages may be used for both. A template can be downloaded here. Papers will not be judged on their length, so do not feel obligated to fill up 12 pages if you can effectively communicate your ideas in fewer pages.

NINeS submissions are double-blind, and thus authors must make a good faith effort to anonymize papers. In particular, authors should not identify themselves either explicitly or by implication (e.g., through references or acknowledgments). However, only non-destructive anonymization is required. For example, system names may be left de-anonymized, if the system name is important for a reviewer to be able to evaluate the work. Submitted papers can be posted on arXiv and authors may give talks about these. We only ask that you do not deliberately contact and disclose information about the submission to PC members.

Ethical Policies and Concurrent Submissions

While NINeS is not an ACM conference, all submitted papers must adhere to ACM’s policies on research involving human participants. Furthermore, authors must attest that their work complies with all applicable ethical standards of their home institution(s), including but not limited to privacy policies and policies on experiments involving humans. Note that submitting research for approval by one’s institution’s ethics review body is necessary, but not sufficient – in cases where the PC has concerns about the ethics of the work in a submission, the PC will make its own decision about whether to publish the work. Authors must be available at any time during the review process to rapidly respond to queries from the PC chairs regarding ethical standards.

Concurrent submissions of the same work to NINeS and any other peer-reviewed venue is prohibited, and will result in the immediate rejection of the NINeS submission. “Same” means substantially similar, regardless of the differences in length or level of detail. “Concurrent” means any other peer-reviewed venue whose reviewing period (i.e., the time between submission and notification) overlaps with that of NINeS. However, NINeS adopts the common practice that a NINeS submission may be based on an earlier position paper (e.g., one that appeared at HotNets) as long as the submissions are not concurrent and the incremental contribution over the previous publication is significant. In such “consecutive” rather than concurrent submissions, NINeS will follow the SIGCOMM standard that once the delta between the two works is determined to be sufficiently large, the NINeS submission will be evaluated on the total contribution of the paper rather than merely on the delta. Authors with questions about the concurrent submission policy are encouraged to contact the PC chairs prior to submitting.

The use of AI: We are all aware that the use of LLMs is transforming how we do research. There are some clearly acceptable uses (minor editorial help with the text) and some clearly unacceptable uses (pointing the LLM at some work on a topic and asking it to write a paper), but we as a community do not have enough experience with these technologies to make more precise policies. For NINeS, we want to gather more information about how you used LLMs in your work, so we have added some questions on the HotCRP submission form. Our only requirement is that you honestly disclose how you used LLMs in your research. Thank you for your cooperation.