CONEXT

Welcome to ACM CoNEXT 2013 and Santa Barbara! This is the ninth ACM CoNEXT (COnference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies) conference.

In the main technical program, we have 44 strong papers, out of 226 submissions that were reviewed. This is by far the largest program that the flagship ACM conferences on Networking (Sigcomm and CoNEXT) have ever had, however those numbers don't tell the whole story. This year we had a new addition to CoNEXT - the CoNEXT Steering Committee tasked us with including short papers in the program. We are delighted to report that the experiment has worked well and 15 of those 44 papers are short papers! 83 out of the 226 submissions were short papers and we ended up with roughly the same selectivity of short and full papers.

Since this was a new concept for CoNEXT, we were unsure of what the response was going to be. We were pleasantly surprised that even with some hiccups surrounding the submission date etc., there was strong interest in short submissions and a special thanks goes to Sanjay Rao, our publicity chair, who spread the word around diligently.

We had the same 50 member TPC for both the short as well as full submissions and our instructions to the TPC in reviewing the short papers were clear - give emphasis to novelty over completeness. The review process for both kinds of submissions ran in parallel and we had the TPC meeting in Barcelona in early September. The TPC meeting was hosted in the beautiful campus of Telefonica University and we had a strong in-person participation. Those who could not be there in person participated via teleconference and we need to give a special thanks to Jim Kurose who generously donated the licenses for the teleconferencing to work. In the end, almost every TPC member participated in the meeting, either physically or remotely. Over one and a half days the TPC deliberated and came out with the exceptionally strong program that we have. Even after the meeting a large fraction of the TPC continued to shepherd all the accepted papers into the form that you see them now, and the authors would agree with us that the process has improved the papers significantly. Our heartfelt thanks go out to the TPC who made our task so easy and made us look good.