2nd GNNet Workshop

Graph Neural Networking Workshop
Co-located with ACM CoNEXT 2023
December 8, 2023

We are glad to announce the “2nd Graph Neural Networking Workshop 2023”, which is organized as part of “ACM CoNEXT 2023” to be held in Paris. All accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings and be made available in the ACM Digital Library.

Motivation

While AI/ML is today mainstream in domains such as computer vision and speech recognition, traditional AI/ML approaches have produced below-par results in many networking applications. Proposed AI/ML solutions in networking do not properly generalize, can be unreliable and ineffective in real-network deployments, and are in general unable to properly deal with the strong dynamics and changes (i.e., concept drift) occurring in networking applications. Graphs are emerging as an abstraction to represent complex data. Computer Networks are fundamentally graphs, and many of their relevant characteristics – such as topology and routing – are represented as graph-structured data. Machine learning, especially deep representation learning, on graphs is an emerging field with a wide array of applications. Within this field, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been recently proposed to model and learn over graph-structured data. Due to their unique ability to generalize over graph data, GNNs are a central tool to apply AI/ML techniques to networking applications.

Workshop goal

The goal of GNNet is to leverage graph data representations and modern GNN technology to advance the application of AI/ML in networking. GNNet provides the first dedicated venue to present and discuss the latest advancements on GNNs and general AI/ML on graphs applied to networking problems. GNNet will bring together leaders from academia and industry to showcase recent methodological advances of GNNs and their application to networking problems, covering a wide range of applications and practical challenges for large-scale training and deployment.

We expect GNNet would serve as the meeting point for the growing community on this fascinating domain, which has currently not a specific forum for sharing and discussion.

The GNNet workshop seeks for contributions in the field of GNNs and graph-based learing applied to data communication networking problems, including the analysis of on-line and off-line massive datasets, network traffic traces, topological data, cybersecurity, performance measurements, and more. GNNet also encourages novel and out-of-the-box approaches and use cases related to the application of GNNs in networking. The workshop will allow researchers and practitioners to discuss the open issues related to the application of GNNs and graph-based learning to networking problems and to share new ideas and techniques for big data analysis and AI/ML in data communication networks.

Keynotes

Pietro Liò

Pietro Liò is Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Technology of the University of Cambridge. He is member of the Artificial Intelligence Group and the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine. His research interest focuses on developing Artificial Intelligence and Computational Biology models to understand diseases complexity and address personalised and precision medicine. Current focus is on Graph Neural Network modeling.

Dario Rossi

Dario Rossi a Scientific Director at Huawei, currently serving as Director of the AI4NET Lab and Director of the DataCom Lab at the Huawei Paris Research Center. He holds an HDR (2010) from UPMC, and PhD (2005) and MSc (2001) degrees from Politecnico di Torino. Before joining Huawei in 2018 as Distinguished Engineer and Team leader, he held Full Professor positions at Telecom Paris (currently on sabbatical) and Ecole Polytechnique and was holder of Cisco’s Chair NewNet@Paris. He coauthored 15+ patents and over 200+ papers in leading conferences and journals, that attracted over 7500+ citations, received 9 best paper awards, a Google Faculty Research Award (2015) and an IRTF Applied Network Research Prize (2016).

Special session

GNNet would also include a dedicated special session where the top teams competing at the third edition of the Graph Neural Networking Challenge (https://bnn.upc.edu/challenge/gnnet2023/) would be invited to present the winning solutions of the challenge, providing an excellent complement to the main program.

Topics of Interest

We encourage both mature and positioning submissions describing systems, platforms, algorithms and applications addressing all facets of the application of GNNs and Machine learning on graphs to the analysis of data communication networks. We are particularly interested in disruptive and novel ideas that permit to unleash the power of GNNs in the networking domain. The following is a non-exhaustive list of topics:

GNNs and graph-based learing in networking applications
Representation Learning on networking-related graphs
Application of GNNs to network and service management
Application of GNNs to network security and anomaly detection
Application of GNNs to detection of malware, botnets, intrusions, phishing, and abuse detection
Adversarial learning for GNN-driven networking applications
GNNs for data generation and digital twining in networking
Temporal and dynamic GNNs in networking
Graph-based analytics for visualization of complex networking applications
Libraries, benchmarks, and datasets for GNN-based networking applications
Scalability of GNNs for networking applications
Explainability, fairness, accountability, transparency, and privacy issues in GNN-based networking
Challenges, pitfalls, and negative results in applying GNNs to networking applications

Submission Instructions

Submissions must be original, unpublished work, and not under consideration at another conference or journal. Submitted papers must be at most six (6) pages long, including all figures, tables, references, and appendices in two-column 10pt ACM format. Papers must include authors names and affiliations for single-blind peer reviewing by the PC. Authors of accepted papers are expected to present their papers at the workshop.

All accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings and be made available in the ACM Digital Library.

Please submit your papers at https://conext-gnnet2023.hotcrp.com

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: ~~September 8, 2023~~ September 30, 2023 (extended – HARD DEADLINE)
Paper acceptance notifications: ~~October 18, 2023~~ October 21, 2023 (extended)
Camera ready due: October 25, 2023
Workshop date: December 8, 2023

Please note that these dates are tentative and may still change slightly in the next few weeks. Please stay tuned for further updates.

Workshop Chairs

Pere Barlet-Ros

BNN-UPC, Spain

Pedro Casas

AIT, Austria

Franco Scarselli

University of Siena, Italy

José Suárez-Varela

Telefónica Research

Albert Cabellos