3rd GNNet Workshop

Graph Neural Networking Workshop
Co-located with ACM CoNEXT 2024
December 9, 2024

We are glad to announce the “3rd Graph Neural Networking Workshop 2024”, which is organized as part of “ACM CoNEXT 2024” to be held in Los Ángeles. 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.

This edition welcomes not only applications of GNN models to problems in communication systems, but also the application of novel ML solutions based on graph representations, such as Transformers, Geometric Deep Learning, Topological Deep Learning, or any other graph-based ML methods

Keynotes

Marco Mellia

Marco Mellia is a full professor at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, where he is the coordinator of the SmartData@PoliTO center on Big Data, Machine Learning and Data Science. His research interests are in the area of Internet monitoring, users’ characterisation, cyber security, and big data analytics applied to different areas. He has co-authored over 250 papers published in international journals and presented in leading conferences. He won the IRTF ANR Prize at IETF-88, and best paper award at IEEE P2P’12, ACM CoNEXT’13, IEEE ICDCS’15. He is Fellow of IEEE and Editor in Chief of the Proceedings of the ACM on Networking.

Guillermo Bernárdez

Guillermo Bernárdez is a Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Santa Barbara, where he works in the Geometric Intelligence lab lead by Prof. Nina Miolane. He holds a PhD in the area of Machine Learning applied to Computer Networks at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, and a MSc degree in Artificial Intellicence from the same university. Previously he received his BSc degrees in Mathematics and Physics from Universitat de Barcelona. During 2023, he was a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK) under the supervision of Prof. Pietro Lio, where he started working on the fields of Topological and Geometric Deep Learning —currently his main research topics.

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
Transformers, Geometric Deep Learning and Topological Deep Learning applied to computer networks

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-gnnet2024.hotcrp.com/

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: ~~July 15, 2024~~ July 31, 2024 (hard deadline)
Paper acceptance notifications: ~~August 31, 2024~~ September 10, 2024 (extended)
Camera ready due: ~~September 23, 2024~~ September 30, 2024 (extended)
Workshop date: December 9, 2024

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