New Ideas in Networked Systems — 2027 |
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What is the topical scope of NINeS? The scope of NINeS is intended to be very similar to SIGCOMM, covering any topic related to networking or distributed systems. However, being topically in-scope is not sufficient for consideration by the NINeS program committee (PC). As the CfP makes clear, the PC chairs may desk-reject papers that (i) clearly do not satisfy the three basic criteria as described in the CfP or (ii) address a topic that the current PC cannot knowledgeably review. Authors should thus be aware that while NINeS welcomes new ideas, the NINeS PC may not be equipped to evaluate papers on new topics that require specialized knowledge.
How does NINeS relate to SIGCOMM and NSDI? The topical coverage of NINeS is very similar to SIGCOMM and NSDI, but the reviewing philosophy is different. As described in the statement of purpose, NINeS will focus on new ideas. Evaluating the “newness” of an idea is not straightforward, because every published paper contains novel material that could be construed as constituting a new idea. In NINeS, we are looking for more than novelty; we are looking for ideas that represent a significant shift away from current practice or belief because such ideas may become part of the intellectual foundations of the field rather than just leading to incremental improvements in existing practice. Determining whether an idea qualifies as new by this definition is, of course, a subjective judgement, but that is true for many PC deliberations.
Isn’t NINeS just a longer HotNets? In terms of each paper, the answer is basically “yes”. In fact, much of the NINeS call for papers echoes the language in recent HotNets call for papers. However, many HotNets PC chairs have privately said that they wish HotNets papers were “hotter” and that too many HotNets papers resemble shorter SIGCOMM papers. This is natural, because the traditional publication venues – SIGCOMM and NSDI in particular – are not very welcoming of new ideas, so there is a strong disincentive to embarking on research projects involving new ideas if it is difficult to publish a full-length paper on them. NINeS was founded to make it easier to publish full-length papers about new ideas. The presence of a full-length publication venue for new ideas will hopefully encourage more people to write “hotter” HotNets paper. Thus, one should not view NINeS being a “longer form HotNets” as a problem, but rather as an important step forward that may lead to a broader emphasis on new ideas within the research community.
If NINeS is about new ideas, how much evidence should submissions provide that the idea works? Our general guidance is contained in our statement of purpose, where we stated:
To be more welcoming of new ideas, NINeS must establish a different culture of reviewing, one that first focuses on the quality of the key ideas, and only if those ideas are found sufficiently new and interesting is the quality of the idea’s evaluation examined. It is often hard to evaluate new ideas, so the standard should be whether the conceptual and/or practical benefit of a new idea is sufficiently plausible, not whether it is thoroughly proven. Our evaluation criterion purposely does not include the deployability of an idea (i.e., as determined by its compatibility with the current infrastructure or the incentives of the incumbents), as it is not the job of the research community to limit future possibilities to those whose deployment we can imagine now; the Internet would clearly have failed that test.
The bar of “sufficiently plausible” will depend on the idea in question. The program committee will expect some effort devoted to exploring the feasibility and the benefits of the approach – through well reasoned arguments and/or experimental evaluation – and papers should be forthright about possible deficiencies or problematic scenarios in the ideas being presented. However, we understand that it is impossible to refute all possible downsides of a new idea, so sufficiently plausible seems the most reasonable criterion.
Isn’t NINeS just promoting “clean slate” all over again? It is true that NINeS does not want to preclude publication of designs that would be hard to deploy today. However, all papers – including ones that contain hard-to-deploy designs – will be evaluated on whether they have some significant new idea. Many clean slate papers do not contain a significant new idea at their core, and only those with such a core contribution will be welcome at NINeS.
What kind of ideas qualify as a new idea? The phrase “new idea” is often construed to mean a new design to solve an existing problem. In NINeS we adopt a more general notion of “newness” that includes anything that may lead to a significant shift away from current practice or belief. This definition includes (but is not limited to): new problems that have not been articulated or addressed, new perspectives on old problems that change how we think about networked systems, and new developments in practice that our community may not be aware of but are important for how we think about future networked systems.
Will NINeS welcome papers from industry? Yes, of course. All papers, regardless of author affiliation, will be welcomed. NINeS will not have a separate operational track, but papers on operational experience that qualify as having a new idea according to the discussion above will be welcome.
How do you see NINeS evolving over time? New ideas that should be part of our intellectual foundation are hard to come by. We therefore assume that the number of submitted or accepted papers in NINeS will never come close to those numbers at SIGCOMM and NSDI. We are arranging the in-conference NINeS program around activities other than talks on accepted papers, and those activities are intended to engage all participants, so it is possible that the attendance at NINeS becomes large over time despite the fact that the number of accepted papers is small compared to SIGCOMM and NSDI. In addition, we are requiring that NINeS papers be written so that most in our research community can understand the paper’s content and contribution. This requirement is intended to reduce our current intellectual fragmentation, where an increasing number of papers are only accessible to experts in the area and the community as a whole largely ignores them. Lastly, our use of the tagline “All the new ideas fit to discuss” is intended to capture the purpose of NINeS; we want our papers to be accessible to the community so that we can engage in broader community-wide discussions about future directions for the field of networked systems. Without such discussions, conferences become merely journals with taped presentations.
Why does the NINeS statement of purpose focus so much on the reviewing culture? When we look across the spectrum of academic computer science conferences, they differ in how reviewers weigh such factors as the practical importance of the problem, the potential deployability of the solution, the technical depth of the result, the level of empirical evidence, and the boldness of the core ideas. These preferences are typically not written down, but have evolved over time as a shared “culture” of reviewing within a particular conference community. We started NINeS because we felt that the prevailing reviewing culture in networked systems was becoming too narrow and negative, making it hard to publish new ideas. The answer was not to write more screeds on how SIGCOMM should change (trust us, we tried), but to start with a new community that was explicitly organized around the goal of being more welcoming of new ideas.
Can you tell us more concretely how reviewing in NINeS will be different from other conferences? As described in the statement of purpose, we are adopting some procedural steps to ensure that the reviewing process involves more interactions between reviewers, so that a shared culture can arise and be continually reinforced. An additional step towards this goal is to put more power in the hands of PC chairs, so that they can make the final calls on papers (rather than rely on a vote of the PC or of the reviewers of a paper) on papers where there is no consensus, and can remove reviews or reviewers that are not in line with the goals of NINeS. Each set of PC chairs will develop more specific mechanisms for their PC, and we expect them to evolve over time (so we do not speculate on them here).
Will NINeS address all the complaints authors (rightly) have about conferences? There is no way any single conference can address all the publication needs of the research community, so NINeS is focused on solving one problem in particular: the difficulty of publishing bold new ideas. And we accept that, despite our best efforts, NINeS will occasionally fall short even within the scope of that narrow goal. NINeS is intended to be a highly selective conference, so most papers will be rejected. We recognize that many authors will be unhappy with their rejections, and in some cases deservedly so. The goal of NINeS is not to seek perfection but to create a reviewing process that (quoting the statement of purpose) is “welcoming of new ideas, constructive about flawed ideas, and humble about our ability to tell the difference.”
Why is the inaugural edition of NINeS online? We made this decision very reluctantly, as we believe that in-person meetings are far more conducive to the kinds of discussion the research community needs to have. But the benefits of in-person meetings are mostly restricted to those in attendance, and we feared that the first edition, particularly with such short notice and lack of formal organizational affiliation, would not attract a large number of attendees. We are therefore making our first event online and free-of-charge to maximize the participation in NINeS.
Is NINeS a conference or a workshop? NINeS is most definitely a conference, with full-length papers. NINeS should be thought of as in the same category as SIGCOMM and NSDI.
Will tenure and recruiting committees take publications in NINeS seriously? We expect NINeS to be a highly selective conference that, with its emphasis on accepting new ideas over more incremental ones, will occupy a unique niche in the field of networked systems. As such, we believe it will soon be seen as a top tier publication venue, much as NSDI quickly made the transition to a top tier venue. In the meantime, the Steering Committee plans to write an open letter that can be shared with tenure and recruiting committees that explains the emphasis NINeS places on new ideas and the level of excellence of its accepted papers.
Does NINeS accept position papers? NINeS will not have a separate track for position papers, and will evaluate all papers according to their technical content. However, the term “position paper” can mean many things, and some papers that qualify under that broad term may be appropriate for NINeS. For instance, NINeS could be appropriate for a paper that is advocating a particular design approach where the arguments are technical in nature. However, NINeS is definitely not the right venue for papers espousing an opinion where the arguments are nontechnical in nature; such a paper would be more suitable for a CCR editorial, and that venue reaches a similar audience.
How can you get NINeS from New Ideas in Networked Systems? Some idiot thought it would be clever to use the “Ne” from “Networked” in the acronym, as in: New Ideas in Networked Systems. That person no longer works for us.