New Ideas in Networked Systems — 2026 |
||||
| Home | Call for Papers | Frequently Asked Questions | Statement of Purpose | Organizers |
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 paper on them. NINeS was founded to make it easier to publish papers about new ideas. The presence of a full-length and archived 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 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 significant 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 this just “clean slate” all over again? It is true that NINeS does not want to preclude publication of ideas that would be hard to deploy today. However, all papers – including ones that contain hard-to-deploy ideas – will be evaluated on whether they have some significant core insight. Many clean slate ideas do not have such a core contribution, though some do, and only those will be welcome at NINeS.
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. 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 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 culture in networked systems was becoming too 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. 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. It is not that we think the NINeS reviewing culture is the only appropriate reviewing culture, but that we should have at least one full-length conference that is more welcoming of new ideas.
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.