ICIN 2021 is planned to be held in Paris in March 2021. The organizing committee (OC) is closely monitoring the development of the COVID-19 situation that could impact paper submissions and in-person attendance. In case of travel restrictions, a partially or fully virtual conference could become necessary and video/remote presentations will be accepted. In addition, the OC is also investigating remote participation under all circumstances. 

The theme of the conference for 2021 is the melding of network and computing services that is clearly demonstrated by the increasing softwarization of the network services in the the core and the access networks, the rise of computing in the network and the growth of cognition in networking for management and control as well as for value added services at the edge and in the data center. Several innovations are impacting the ongoing transformations toward the network of the future and the evolution of cloud services.  More and more the network fabric itself emcompasses functionality usually associated with computing as increased intelligence and cognition are necessary to address emerging requirements of distributed services, automation and network reliability. At the same time, more and more, the cloud is extending to the edge adding a number of heterogeneous networked subsystems to the Internet with a variety of requirements that further highlight the need for novel architectures , e.g., IoT systems, augmented and virtual reality and service delivery platforms. The result is the networking and computing systems becoming one, melding, as a distributed cloud/edge continuum with cognition and intelligence for emerging services. This “Computing and Networking as a Service” is the paradigm that will be central to the deployment of immersive services in many different sectors, such as  e-health, self-driving cars, industrial networks, agriculture and cloud robotics.

In this scenario and considering the many challenges that the aforementioned

paradigms and technologies will bring, the theme for ICIN 2021 is proposed as:

“Services everywhere: melding networking and computing in an intelligent cloud-edge continuum”

The conference will foster discussion about new ideas and novel approaches for future service delivery in the emerging scenario of immersive intelligence. With this vision, the conference will look beyond the current state of the art and promote the advances of Computing as a Service technologies for different application service delivery platforms.

Interested authors are invited to submit papers presenting novel technical research as well as broader position and visionary papers. Contributions that discuss lessons learnt and best practices, describe practical deployment and implementation experiences as well as demonstrating innovative use-cases are also and especially encouraged.