New Ideas in Networked Systems — 2026

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NINeS 2026: Pods: Imperial

This POD will be held at Imperial College London and is organised by Marios Kogias.

To help us with organising things, please register here to attend this pod.

Access

The pod will take place at Imperial’s Business School (Room ICBS LG100). To get there enter through the main entrace on Exhibition Road, turn right, and go down the strairs.

Schedule

Time Event
09:00 - 9:10 Welcome
9:10 - 10:30 Discussion on NINES papers
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 - 12:30 Panel Discussion hosted by Microsoft: Data-Center Networking and Emerging Hardware
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch
14:00 - 15:00 Keynote by Katerina Argyraki: Stuff I wish I had been told (about the PhD, the faculty-job interviews, and trying to get tenure.)
15:00 - 16:00 Keynote by Michael Schapira: Adventures in Analog Computing
16:00 - 17:00 Open Mic: Pitch your research idea
17:30 - ? Pub Social

Details

Keynote: Adventures in Analog Computing

Speaker: Michael Schapira

Growing computational demands have renewed interest in unconventional hardware, including quantum and analog systems, for solving complex problems. The utility of such hardware depends on its expressiveness, i.e., the range of problems it can efficiently address. Quantum hardware is restricted to binary solution spaces, limiting its practical scope. In contrast, recent advances in analog hardware and algorithms enable far greater expressiveness by supporting both continuous and binary variables. This review introduces the Analog Computing Expressiveness (ACE) framework, a hierarchical classification of problems suited to analog computing, and shows that recent progress enables solutions across all levels of the hierarchy. We further demonstrate how core problems in optimization, game theory, and control theory naturally fit within ACE, underscoring the broader applicability of analog computing. Finally, we discuss extensions of the ACE hierarchy to emerging applications, including control methods based on learned world models.

Panel Discussion: Data-Center Networking and Emerging Hardware

Hosts: Paolo Costa, Hitesh Balani (Microsoft)

Panelists: Dushyanth Narayanan (Microsoft), Mark Handley (UCL/OpenAI), Nick McKeown (Stanford)