Dear colleagues,
Apologies for cross-posting.
We are pleased to announce the call for papers for NTC-Reloaded 2026: Rethinking AI Methods for Networking, co-located with ACM CoNEXT 2026 in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Workshop date: TBA, within 7–11 December 2026
Website: https://ntc-reloaded.github.io/
AI methods are now widely used in networking research, but their progress is increasingly difficult to assess. In areas such as Network Traffic Classification, recent studies have exposed recurring methodological weaknesses, including dataset leakage, shortcut learning, unrealistic evaluation settings, limited reproducibility, and fragile claims of generalisation.
NTC-Reloaded 2026 aims to provide a venue for work that critically examines these issues and helps the community move toward more rigorous, reproducible, and realistic AI-driven networking research. Network Traffic Classification is our flagship scenario, but we welcome contributions from across networking, security, systems, and trustworthy AI whenever they help clarify how genuine progress should be measured.
We particularly encourage submissions that:
Revisit or challenge established assumptions in AI-based networking research;
Expose limitations, biases, leakage, shortcuts, or reproducibility issues in existing methods;
Propose better benchmarks, datasets, tasks, or evaluation frameworks;
Study robustness, generalisation, interpretability, or deployment realism;
Report negative results, replication studies, or lessons learned from failed approaches;
Develop new AI methods together with convincing evidence that they capture meaningful network properties rather than spurious correlations.
We invite original research papers, measurement studies, system papers, position papers, experience reports, replication studies, failure analyses, and visionary contributions.
Important dates
Paper submission deadline: 14 July 2026
Acceptance notification: 30 August 2026
Camera-ready due: 25 September 2026
Program available online: 15 October 2026
Workshop day: TBA, within 7–11 December 2026
Accepted papers will appear and be indexed in the ACM Digital Library.
Full details, including topics of interest and submission instructions, are available at:
https://ntc-reloaded.github.io/
Please feel free to circulate this call to colleagues and students who may be interested.