A roundtable conversation with the future of our field – early career researchers pursuing a networking research career. Your chance to hear, understand, and discuss this group’s desires, ambitions, hopes, and concerns about their place in the future networking research landscape.

As the field of networking turns 60 years old, networking research has undergone many shifts – from its ARPAnet, Cyclades and other pre-Internet days, to the explosion of interest in core and transport networking in the 1980’s and 1990’s to an increasing emphasis on peer-to-peer networks, mobile networks, software-defined networking, data-center networking and distributed network services at scale. As information networks have become ever more central elements of modern society, research is also broadening to include intersections with other areas of computer science (e.g., AI, programming languages, data systems), and increasing interactions with fields such as the social sciences. This expanding and expansive view of networking research compels a range of new research approaches, methodologies, challenges, opportunities, perspectives—and obligations.

Our roundtable participants, whose research and aspirations put them at the vanguard of this shift, will discuss their visions for the field and their places within it. We will ask them to identify the challenges they see themselves facing in realizing these visions, the nature of the choices they have made to get to this stage in their careers, and their hopes for how future workplaces will support them. Discussion will address what the changing networking research environment looks like from their points of view.

Among the questions and topics this roundtable discussion will address are:

● Motivations. What motivated you to pursue networking research? What is important to you as a researcher in the networking field, in terms of opportunities, and experiences?

● Intellectual challenges. What are some of the key intellectual challenges in networking research and how might these differ in terms of research approaches, collaborations, infrastructure or otherwise from research that might have been carried out say 10 or 15 years ago?

● Professional challenges. Structurally or pragmatically, what difficulties or roadblocks do you anticipate in carrying out your research in your organization, or in the field?