The 22nd IEEE Global Internet Symposium took place in Paris, France, on April 29, 2019, in conjunction with IEEE INFOCOM 2019.
This year, on request of the INFOCOM workshop chairs, the GI symposium was merged with another workshop on “Networking in developing countries”. This means that the symposium had a track on developing countries, and we added as co-TPC chairs for this track Ahmed Elmokashfi (Simula, Norway) and Alessandro Improta (IIT-CNR, Italy). There were a total of 11 papers submitted to the symposium. Five papers were accepted resulting in an acceptance ratio of 45%. In almost all cases, each paper received reviews from four TPC members. There were 26 internationally well-known TPC members, so the review load was not excessive.
This year, the workshop was taking place over half a day (afternoon), starting with a keynote by Dr. Gareth Tyson, and followed by two technical sessions, one on “Networking in developing countries”, and the other on “Trends in the Global Internet”. Despite the limited number of accepted papers, the attendance was very active, leading to many questions and discussions regarding the papers. The workshop was attended by 12 researchers.
Overall, despite the limited number of submissions, we are happy with this year’s GI symposium and believe it was a success in terms of the quality of the final program. We also believe we continued to maintain the overall reputation of the symposium built over more than 20 years. One suggestion for the future is that the symposium probably needs to be co-located with a more appropriate venue than INFOCOM, for example a more “systems-oriented” one. It seems that the INFOCOM audience has less and less interest in the practical focus of GI.
Finally, we would like to thank the work of everyone involved who made the workshop a success, from the local student volunteers to the TPC, to the rest of the organizing committee, to the steering committee. Without their work and dedication, the symposium would not have been possible.
[Report submitted by Steve Uhlig and Felix Cuadrado, Co-Chairs GI 2019]