Welcome from the General Chair

Ryan Stutsman

Opening by the Program Chairs

Michael Schapira and Paolo Costa

Interactive Session I: AI Infrastructure

New Fabrics and Computation-Aware Networking

Expert: Costin Raiciu

How should networking change when communication, computation, and memory are increasingly tightly coupled inside AI systems?

Zone A: Rethinking the AI fabric

• Scale-up networking: the next frontier for networking researchAndrei Stan (University Politehnica of Bucharest and Jump Trading); Ştefan-Alexandru Pantucu (University Politehnica of Bucharest); William X. Zheng (UC Berkeley); Zhongjie Chen (Microsoft); Ziming Mao, Rishabh Iyer, Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley); Costin Raiciu (Broadcom and University Politehnica of Bucharest)PDFShort videoFull video
• Who Needs DRAM? We Have FiberDemo tableHannah Atmer, Yuan Yao (Uppsala University); Thiemo Voigt (Uppsala University and RISE Computer Science); Stefanos Kaxiras (Uppsala University)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Understanding Contention in GPU Scale-Up DomainsWilliam X. Zheng (UC Berkeley); Zihan Zhao (University of Virginia); Ziming Mao (UC Berkeley); Andrei Stan (University Pollitehnica of Bucharest); Haiying Shen (University of Virginia); Costin Raiciu (Broadcom and University Politehnica of Bucharest); Jing Liu, Zhongjie Chen (Microsoft Research); Rishabh Iyer, Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley)PDFShort videoFull video
• Programmable Scale-Up Switches for Software-Defined GPU FabricsShouxu Lin (Cornell University); Ran Shu (Microsoft Research); Daehyeok Kim (University of Texas at Austin); Jiaxin Lin (Cornell University)PDFShort videoFull video

Zone B: Communication that understands computation

• Collectives Are Network ProgramsSeyyidahmed lahmer (IMEC); Kalyan Pullela, H B Acharya (Oklahoma State University)PDFShort videoFull video
• Cross-Phase Blending: Why AI Fabrics Need Phase-Aware TransportSoudeh Ghorbani (Microsoft Research & Rutgers); Ying Zhang (Meta)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Breaking Temporal Symmetry in Collective Communication AlgorithmsArjun Devraj, Rachee Singh (Cornell University)PDFShort videoFull video

Interactive Session II: Autonomous Systems

Knowledge, Agents, and Guarantees

Expert: Ratul Mahajan

What do increasingly autonomous networks need to know, how should they reason and interact, and what guarantees are needed to keep their behavior trustworthy?

Zone A: What autonomous operation needs to know

• Instantiating the Knowledge PlaneDemo tableFrancisco Pereira (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon); Justine Sherry (Carnegie Mellon University and Amazon Prime Video); Pratiksha Thaker (Databricks)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Forecasting Routing InputsJean Mégret, Tibor Schneider, Laurent Vanbever (ETH Zürich)PDFShort videoArtifact
• The Cloud Should Adapt to Its Applications, Not the Other Way Around!Demo tableSachin Ashok (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Karuna Grewal (Cornell University); Talha Waheed, Gangmuk Lim (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Gerard Matthew (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Amazon); Aditya S Prerepa, P. Brighten Godfrey (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Justin Hsu (Cornell University); Radhika Mittal (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Toward a World Model for the Kernel Network StackLuyao Bai, Xiaoguang Wang (University of Illinois Chicago)PDFShort videoArtifactArtifact guideFull video
• Agentic Societies Need a Social HarnessTapan Chugh, Vidushi Singh, Krish Jain, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Ratul Mahajan (University of Washington)PDFShort videoArtifact

Zone B: Making automation explicit and checkable

• Self-evolving network verifiersIoannis Protogeros, Tibor Schneider, Laurent Vanbever (ETH Zürich)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Toward Safely Optimizing eBPF Programs using Transformation WitnessesXiangyu Gao (University of Washington); Alejandro de Cock Buning (Carlos III University of Madrid); Xiangfeng Zhu (University of Washington); Jocelyn Qiaochu Chen (University of Alberta); Konstantinos Kallas (University of California, Los Angeles); Arvind Krishnamurthy, Ratul Mahajan (University of Washington)PDFShort video
• Invariant Discovery for Networked SystemsDemo tableHongyu Hè (Princeton); Alexander Krentsel, Sylvia Ratnasamy (UC Berkeley / Google); Maria Apostolaki (Princeton)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Intent-Based Verification of Service Mesh ConfigurationDemo tableRuize Ma, Haoxian Chen (ShanghaiTech University)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Formal operations specifications for reliable system managementJinlang Wang (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Jiawei Tyler Gu (Databricks); Ruize Tang (Microsoft Research Asia); Tej Chajed (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Tianyin Xu (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Xudong Sun (University of Toronto)PDFShort videoFull video

Ion Stoica in Conversation with Jeff Mogul

Jeff Mogul talks with Ion Stoica about how networking research and the networking community have evolved, lessons from that evolution, and the questions and opportunities that may shape what comes next.

Interactive Sessions III & IV: Hardware, Accelerators, and Hidden Resource Boundaries / Satellite and Extreme Wireless Networking

Experts: Mark Silberstein and Dinesh Bharadia

Two rapidly changing boundaries of networking: the hardware that increasingly shapes networked computation, and satellite and extreme wireless systems.

Interactive Session III: Satellite and Extreme Wireless Networking

How should satellite and extreme wireless networking evolve for new orbital users, rapidly changing connectivity, constrained devices, and difficult low-SNR links?

• Rethinking LEO Networks for Users in OrbitDemo table
  remoteJiabo Yang, Lixin Liu
  Jiabo Yang (Tsinghua University); Lixin Liu (Zhongguancun Laboratory); Yuanjie Li, Hewu Li, Qian Wu, Zeqi Lai, Jun Liu (Tsinghua University)PDFShort videoFull video
• What Goes Around Comes Around: Predictive Ground Station Selection For LEO ConstellationsFan-Xue Gabriella Reidys, Mubashir Anwar, Ragini Gupta, Aryan Taneja, Deepak Vasisht, Matthew Caesar (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)PDFShort videoFull video
• Frozen Radio Silicon Need Not Freeze Access: Concurrent Satellite-IoT Uplink on Deployed RadiosRohith Reddy Vennam, William Hunter, Dinesh Bharadia (University of California San Diego)PDFShort videoArtifact
• How to Dream in Space (Without Getting Burned): A Perspective on LEO Networking ResearchDemo tableChris Misa, Zander Chown (University of Oregon); Ramakrishnan Durairajan (University of Oregon, Link Oregon)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Enabling ``Aggressive'' Non-Orthogonal Transmissions for Improved Connectivity in the Low SNR RegimeDemo table
  remoteKonstantinos Nikitopoulos
  Chathura Jayawardena, Georgios Ntavazlis Katsaros, Konstantinos Nikitopoulos (Institute for Communication Systems, University of Surrey)PDFShort videoArtifact

Interactive Session IV: Hardware, Accelerators, and Hidden Resource Boundaries

Which important resources and costs are hidden by today’s hardware/software abstractions, and what becomes possible when we rethink the boundaries among CPUs, NICs, accelerators, and the network?

• Idle Cycles Are Not Wasted CyclesMatheus Stolet (Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)); Simon Peter (University of Washington); Antoine Kaufmann (Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS))PDFShort videoArtifact
• The NIC Needs An Operating SystemWonsup Yoon, Daehyeok Kim (The University of Texas at Austin)PDFShort videoFull video
• What Is Reconfiguration Delay, Really? An End-to-End View of Photonic SwitchingDeeksha P Rao, Vamsi Addanki (Purdue University)PDFShort videoFull video
• Uncovering SIMD parallelism in CPU Packet Processing using the NIC as a Vector Co-ProcessorKunal Umaji, Shreyas Bargale, Yashvardhan Toshniwal, Yash Mehta (Indian Institute of Technology Madras); Anirudh Sivaraman (New York University); Srinivas Narayana (Rutgers University and Indian Institute of Technology Madras)PDFShort videoFull video

Interactive Session V: Reconsidering the Internet’s Assumptions

Expert: Marwan Fayed

Which properties of today’s Internet are fundamental, and which are historical artifacts that should be reconsidered as clients, applications, and deployment assumptions change?

Zone A: Revisiting inherited assumptions

• (Cache) Congestion ControlDemo tableKian Bahadori, Seyed Mahdi Hosseini, Elie Bruno, Muhammad Abdullah, Pavlos Nikolopoulos, Katerina Argyraki (EPFL)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Routing Security in the Post-Quantum FutureMarco Pioppini (ETH Zürich); Yi-Min Lin (ETH Zurich); Jonghoon Kwon (ETH Zürich); Adrian Perrig (ETH Zurich)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Stateful CGNAT Was a Symptom, Not a Necessity
  remoteBing Swen Sun
  Bing Swen Sun (Peking University)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Infer, Don't Negotiate: Unilateral ML-Based Cipher Selection for DNSSECStefan Schmid (Technical University of Berlin); Haya Schulmann (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE); Juan Vanerio (University of Vienna and Austrian Institute of Technology); Michael Waidner (National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE, Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT, Technische Universität Darmstadt)PDFShort videoFull video

Zone B: New clients, semantics, and user control

• Semantics Delivery Network: Rethinking Web Retrieval Infrastructure for LLM AgentsPeichun Hua, Yunming Xiao (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen)PDFShort videoArtifactFull videoSlides
• When AI Becomes the Viewer: Rethinking Immersive Networking for Human–AI InteractionRuizhi Cheng (George Mason University); Amitabh Varshney (University of Maryland); Bo Han (George Mason University)PDFShort videoFull video
• You Bought It, They Bricked It: A Call for Reclaiming Local ControlDemo tableJack Tigar Humphries (Stellar Development Foundation)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Nothing but the Bit: Wi-Fi Sensing for Predicate-Only Age VerificationGioliano de Oliveira Braga, Rafael Pimenta de Mattos Paixão (ITA); Pedro Henrique dos Santos Rocha (USP); Carlos Henrique G. Ferreira (UFOP); Guevara Noubir (Northeastern University); Lourenço Alves Pereira Júnior (ITA)PDFShort videoFull video
• The Web Needs a Logout Button: Moving Beyond Document Semantics on the WebJames McCauley (Mount Holyoke College)PDFShort videoFull video

HotNets at 25: Looking Back, Taking Stock, Looking Forward Record

What did networking get right and wrong over the past 25 years, where are we today, and what deserves more (or less!) attention next? The discussion will contribute to the HotNets 2051 Time Capsule.

Interactive Session VI: Rethinking How We Do Networking Research

Expert: Vyas Sekar

What determines which networking questions get studied, and what should count as convincing evidence when we answer them?

Zone A: What determines which questions get studied?

• More Streetlights, Please: On the Streetlight Effect in Networking ResearchVyas Sekar (CMU)PDFShort videoArtifact
• No Hyperscaler? No Problem. Your Students also Break (and Fix) NetworksDemo tableConstantine Doumanidis, Hongyu Hè, Maria Apostolaki (Princeton University)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Pramana: A Composable, Domain-Specific Backend for Empirical Networking ResearchJaber Daneshamooz, Eugene Vuong (UCSB); Alagappan Ramanathan (University of California, Irvine); Manni Moghimi (UCSB); Haarika Manda (University of California, Santa Barbara); Satyam Kumar, Snithik Thode (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi); Satyandra Guthula (University of California Santa Barbara); Sylee Beltiukov (University of California, Santa Barbara); Dongsu Han (KAIST); Tarun Mangla (IIT Delhi); Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi (University of California, Irvine); Walter Willinger (Northwestern University); Arpit Gupta (UCSB)PDFShort videoArtifact

Zone B: What makes research convincing?

• The Observer Effect in Internet Measurement: A Case Study of Route Origin ValidationDemo tableAbbas Mohsenpour (UC Louvain); Cristel Pelsser (UCLouvain)PDFShort videoArtifact
• Rediscovering heuristics: A litmus test for RL in networked systemsDemo tableSeoyul Oh (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Yikai Zheng (Tsinghua University); Eric Xiang Gao, Deepak Vasisht, Francis Y. Yan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)PDFShort videoArtifact
• The Case for Automated Probabilistic Reasoning for Network Performance AnalysisDemo tableJamie Kai (University of British Columbia); Rachee Singh (Cornell University); Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo (University of Waterloo)PDFShort videoFull videoArtifact
• Self-Validating Uncertainty // Or: how to do measurement when you cannot afford ground truthFabian Bustamante, Santiago Klein, Caleb Wang, Kedar Thiagarajan, Ying Zhang (Northwestern University)PDFShort videoArtifact

Research in the Age of AI: Setting the Stage

Aurojit Panda

How should AI change the practice of research: from how we learn, train researchers, and choose problems to how we evaluate and communicate results?

Round Tables: Research in the Age of AI

Participants will work in small groups on questions pertaining to evaluating and disseminating research in the age of AI.

Panel 1: Research Evaluation in the Age of AI Record

What should reviewers evaluate, what role should AI play, and what must remain human? What should be disclosed, verified, and ultimately owned by people?

Panel 2: Research Dissemination in the Age of AI Record

What should a research artifact be, what should happen asynchronously, and what should conferences and workshops be for in an AI-rich world?

HotNets closing

A final opportunity to reflect on what emerged over the two days, and on which experiments, questions, and ideas are worth carrying forward.