NINeS 2026: Call for Papers

The inaugural edition of the New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS¹), whose statement of purpose can be found here, hopes to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the intellectual foundations and the practical principles involved in designing future networked systems. This first edition of the NINeS conference will be fully online, but we plan to hold subsequent iterations in-person. This initial edition will be a one-day event on February 10, 2026 that will be accessible free-of-charge to all who are interested. While details have yet to be worked out, the event will have a range of activities – spread across all time zones – that explore the future of networked systems, including pre-recorded talks, real-time panels, and several keynote presentations.

We solicit full-length papers on networked systems that identify fundamental open questions, advocate approaches that significantly differ from common practice, re-frame or debunk current practice, or report on network measurements that identify unusual phenomena. NINeS takes a broad view of the scope of networked-systems research, including any work on networking or distributed systems. A good NINeS submission should:

• Address a new problem or identify a fundamentally new approach, rather than presenting incremental improvements to existing practice.
  
• Motivate the importance of the problem and demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of the approach through well reasoned arguments and/or experimental evaluation, but practical deployment is neither required nor expected.
• 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 specific topic.

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.

All accepted papers will appear in the NINeS proceedings and will be archived. Authors of accepted papers will be required to prepare a video that will be posted on the conference website prior to the actual conference, where conference participants can then engage the authors in an online Q&A. However, accepted papers will not be accompanied by talks at the conference, as we hope to organize the in-conference activities around a broader set of discussions.

Why should you submit to NINeS?

Our hope is that NINeS will be joining SIGCOMM and NSDI as a highly selective conference in the networked systems area, but it is being created with three important differences.

• The reviewing process will favor bold new ideas over more incremental ones, so the papers will be of more general interest.
  
• The program will be smaller, so each paper will get more visibility.
  
• The in-conference activities will not revolve around live presentations of papers but instead will stimulate discussions among all attendees via keynotes, panels, birds-of-feather topical meetings, mentoring sessions, and other activities.

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.

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, as long as they do not deliberately 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 to NINeS and any other peer-reviewed venue that present the same work are 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.

Important Details