CONEXT 2016 Opening

Prof. Michalis Faloutsos began the opening talk by making a reference to the place we are and to what we came here to do. The National Academy of Science, he says, “is a place to think big thoughts, so forget small thoughts and supersize them.” Prof. Faloutsos was followed by Prof. Athina Markopoulou, who discussed some of the schedule and organization matters.

Next, the TCP chairs prof. Dejan Kostic and prof. Vyas Sekar presented this years’ review process and showed related statistics. In particular, the review process happened in two rounds and 35 papers (30 long and 5 short) were selected out of 199 submissions (160 long and 39 short). This makes this years’ acceptance rate around 17.59%.

In the first round, each paper received at least 3 reviews. The TCP attempted to be as positive as possible and accepted all papers with at least one positive review. This resulted in 101 papers (around half of them) being selected to go to the second round.

In the second round, papers received at least 2 reviews. The TCP also had extensive online discussions and appointed external reviewers. This second round selected 60 papers for the TCP meeting.

The TCP had a single-day meeting in which the members discussed all 60 papers (no papers were given pre-acceptance). There was high attendance and the quality of online participation was very satisfactory.

The TPC nominated four papers for Best Paper Award, namely “Passive Communication with Ambient Light,” “MP-DASH: Adaptive Video Streaming Over Preference-Aware Multipath,” “ECN or Delay: Lessons Learnt from Analysis of DCQCN and TIMELY,” and “Maximizing Broadcast Throughput Under Ultra-Low-Power Constraints.” Nomination followed the recommendation of the reviewers. The TPC also appointed a conflict-free committee to decide them, which was composed by Sujata Banerjee, Theo Benson, Olivier Bonaventure, Harsha Madhyastha.

This year the committee awarded 2 papers: “MP-DASH: Adaptive Video Streaming Over Preference-Aware Multipath” and “Maximizing Broadcast Throughput Under Ultra-Low-Power Constraints.”

Finally, prof. Vyas Sekar received the Rising Star Award. Prof. Sekar gave a brilliant keynote speech where he discussed the evolution of his research in security for next-generation networks. Throughout his talk, he showed the insights that he and his colleagues had and the people who contributed to these insights. For more details about his keynote, please check the post CoNEXT 2016 Keynote: Enabling Software-Defined Network Security for Next-Generation Networks.

Summary of the review process:
- 35 papers selected out of 199 (17.59% acceptance rate)
- 30 long papers and 5 short papers accepted
- 101 papers passed a first-round review (~50%); 60 papers passed a second-round and were selected to be discussed in TCP meeting
- 4 papers were nominated for best paper:
    - "Passive Communication with Ambient Light"
    - "MP-DASH: Adaptive Video Streaming Over Preference-Aware Multipath"
    - "ECN or Delay: Lessons Learnt from Analysis of DCQCN and TIMELY"
    - "Maximizing Broadcast Throughput Under Ultra-Low-Power Constraints"
- out of these, 2 papers were awarded:
    - "MP-DASH: Adaptive Video Streaming Over Preference-Aware Multipath"
    - "Maximizing Broadcast Throughput Under Ultra-Low-Power Constraints"