NSDI 2013 Opening Remarks

Jeff Mogul, NSDI co-chair, opened the conference by telling attendees
that there were 170 paper submissions, and each paper received three
first round reviews. About half the papers made it into the second
round, and also received three or four reviews. By the time there
PC meeting occurred, there were 64 papers left. In total, each PC
member performed 25.8 reviews on average. In the end, 38 papers
were accepted, more than usual. Because of this, each presentation
can only be 20 minutes, including questions at the end. And by the
end of the first session, things were going well.

Jeff also pointed out that, with 250 attendees, this is the
almost the largest NSDI ever. Jeff then singled out three PC committee
members for work above and beyond the 'call of duty':
Jeff Chase, James Mickens, and Renata Teixeira.

Glancing at the hot topics graphic, their most mentioned terms were:
network, data, system, applications, paper, power. Jeff magnified
a small section of the chart, where the words "Looking for work"
were visible as a significant topic. Finally, Jeff mentioned that
Ratul Mahajan and Ion Stoica would be the co-chairs for NSDI 2014.

Nick Feamster, the other co-chair, took over for the presentation
of awards. There were two Best Paper and two Community awards:

Embassies: Radically Refactoring the Web
Jon Howell, Bryan Parno, and John R. Douceur, Microsoft Research

F10: A Fault-Tolerant Engineered Network
Vincent Liu, Daniel Halperin, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Thomas Anderson,
University of Washington

Composing Software Defined Networks
Christopher Monsanto and Joshua Reich, Princeton University; Nate Foster,
Cornell University; Jennifer Rexford and David Walker, Princeton University

Expanding Rural Cellular Networks with Virtual Coverage
Kurtis Heimerl and Kashif Ali, University of California, Berkeley;
Joshua Blumenstock, University of Washington; Brian Gawalt and Eric Brewer,
University of California, Berkeley

Howell et al received their Best Paper award for being ambitous,
thought-provoking and even controversial in their paper. Liu et al
got their award for applying simple effective insights to the
co-design of network topology and protocols and evaluating them well.

Community Awards were given to paper authors for contributions to the
community above and beyond the typical paper. Monsanto et al received
their award for releasing the code release of their software, which
the award committee believed would be useful and built upon by the
Software Defined Networking community.  Heimerl et al received their
community award on the basis that this will help with rural cellular
deployments.