NINeS 2026: Call for Talks

The NINeS conference on February 10th 2026 will be a distributed online experience, with a variety of activities including three live keynotes and a variety of online materials, including talks on each accepted paper and several invited talks. We hope to make NINeS a more inclusive experience by also inviting contributed talks from the community-at-large. We hereby invite talks that are no longer than 15-20 minutes, and address one or more of the following questions:

• What research have you done that you ultimately realized was misguided, and why? This is to make our mistakes more visible, because our publication process doesn’t facilitate saying “Oh, I no longer believe that was the right approach.” As context, Scott Shenker will likely contribute a talk on “How I wasted a decade of my life on QoS.”

• What will the Internet (broadly defined) look like in 20 years, and what research should we be doing now to meet the challenges that it will pose? We encourage you to think broadly, and avoid content that is based on your current and/or proposed research.

A subset of the program committee will review these contributions, and select a subset to post on the NINeS website. We will provide more logistical details about how to submit these talks at a later date. We expect that the talks will be due on or before January 30th.