Welcome to HotOptics 2025
HotOptics, inaugurated in 2024, is a workshop that aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from various fields to discuss the latest advancements in optical technologies and their applications in networking.
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What's New?
- February 22, 2025: Video recordings of the inaugural HotOptics 2024 workshop is available.
- February 21, 2025: website is live.
Highlights from HotOptics 2024
The inaugural HotOptics workshop was held on August 4, 2024, as part of SIGCOMM 2024 in Sydney, Australia. The workshop featured four keynote presentations by (U Melbourne), (Columbia), (UCSD) and (Cisco), and a led by Prof. George Porter (UCSD).
Call for Papers for HotOptics 2025
The HotOptics workshop aims to provide a premier forum for researchers, practitioners, and professionals to discuss and advance the latest developments in emerging optical technologies and their applications in networking. This workshop seeks contributions that explore innovative ideas, challenge existing paradigms, and expand the boundaries of research in optical networking technologies.
In particular, the HotOptics workshop seeks to blend novel physical-layer optical technologies with upper-layer computer networking protocols and applications to unlock new synergies. We encourage both bottom-up research that develops new optical devices and systems to enable new features and a top-down approach that integrates these novel features into advanced applications and services. Topics of Interest include, but are not limited to:
Bottom-up Approach: Optical Devices and Systems for Advanced Optical Networks
- On-chip optical interconnect networks
- Inter-chip optical interconnects and optical I/O
- Commercial or Engineering prototypes (optical modulators, optical detectors, optical transceivers, optical amplifiers, etc.)
- Photonic network elements and hardware (e.g., wavelength-selective switches, ROADMs, etc)
- Hollow-core, micro-structured, multi-core, few-mode and multi-mode optical fibers
- Fiber sensing devices and systems in optical networks
- Silicon photonics devices and systems
- Real-time implementation of advanced modulation formats, FEC, and DSP in ASICs and FPGAs in communication networks
- Machine-learning-based techniques for optical devices and system design
- Novel free-space optical communication and networking devices
- Satellite optical communication links
- VCSEL modules and Systems for communication networks
- Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) systems and networks
- Intelligent surfaces for optical wireless and THz communication
Top-down Approach: New Applications and Services enabled by Optical Networks and Systems
- Time synchronization over optical networks
- Anchored modeling (digital-twin) of optical network systems
- Cross-layer optical-IP networks control and resource orchestration
- Optical network planning, optimization, and techno-economic studies
- Scaling optical networks for data center interconnection – spatial division multiplexing or introducing new optical amplifier bands
- Quantum-secured optical networks
- Machine learning applications in optical networks
- Optical technologies for emerging machine learning systems
- Security and privacy issues in optical networks
- Energy efficiency and sustainability in optical networking
- Open/disaggregated optical network architecture
- Advanced computing and storage systems using optical technologies
- Reconfigurable optical network architecture and systems
- Operational aspects of optical network applications, including SDN, NFV, Network management, monitoring, and analytics (AIOps)
Important Dates
- Call for papers: March 6, 2025
- Paper submission deadline: June 6, 2025
- Paper acceptance deadline: July 11, 2025
- Camera-ready deadline: (to be determined)
- Workshop date: September 8, 2025 (first day of SIGCOMM)
Submission Guidelines
We welcome submissions of two types of contributions:
6-Page Short Papers (for publication)
This type of submission presents original, unpublished research work not currently under review by other conferences or journals, and short position papers or vision papers that identify new research problems, advocate for new research methodology, or offer critiques and debate of existing work in the field.
These submissions do not need to be supported by full evaluations - preliminary and proof-of-concept demonstrations are sufficient. The following categories are welcome:
- Position papers that present a future vision or critiques of optical networking research
- Self-sustained work with solid technical contribution and evaluation, but the scope is smaller than a 12-page full paper
- Early-stage work with an initial research idea and preliminary results, to be extended to a full paper later
Format requirements:
- Maximum 6 pages (10 point font, 12 point leading, 7 inch by 9.25 inch text block)
- Including figures and tables
- References and appendix may go beyond the page limit
- Double-blind peer review by the program committee
- Accepted papers will be published in ACM Digital Library
Goal: Provide a venue for researchers to publish and receive timely feedback on ongoing work or not-yet-mature ideas, potentially leading to full papers in venues such as:
- Top conferences: SIGCOMM, NSDI, OSDI, SOSP, ASPLOS, etc
- Top journals: Nature and Science portfolios, JOCN, JLT, Optics Express, etc
3-Page Technical Abstracts (not for publication)
This type of submission presents a summary of early-stage or ongoing work seeking community feedback, as well as highlights of previously published work. No novelty requirement for technical abstracts.
Format requirements:
- Maximum 3 pages (10 point font, 12 point leading, 7 inch by 9.25 inch text block)
- Including figures, tables, references, and appendix
- Single-blind peer review by the program committee
- Will be presented at the workshop but not published in proceedings
Goal: Provide a venue for researchers to:
- Advertise their previously published results to reach a broader audience
- Seek follow-up collaborations involving interdisciplinary expertise
Prospective authors are expected to submit papers written in English using the standard ACM template for conference papers (https://github.com/scyue/latex-sigcomm18). If you are using LaTeX, you may make use of this template for ACM conference proceedings. With the older versions of this template, you must add "10pt" to the documentclass command to meet the submission requirements. The current template sets 10pt by default. (Unlike the official template, it only includes examples for conference proceedings.)
Submissions must be made via the HotOptics website (https://hotoptics25.hotcrp.com/). At least one author from each accepted submission must attend the workshop to present and discuss their work.
If you have any questions, please contact workshop chairs Jesse E. Simsarian (jesse.simsarian@nokia-bell-labs.com), Massimo Tornatore (massimo.tornatore@polimi.it), Yiting Xia (yxia@mpi-inf.mpg.de), and Zhizhen Zhong (zhizhenz@mit.edu).
Paper Conflicts and Peer Review
As part of the paper submission process, authors will be required to provide paper metadata which includes title and abstract, author names, affiliations, contact email addresses, topics matching the subject matter of the paper, and conflicts with program committee (PC) members.
Following the same criteria as SIGCOMM 2025, we define conflict of interest with a PC member using the following principles:
- You are currently employed at the same institution, have been previously employed at the same institution within the last 12 months, or are going to begin employment at the same institution.
- You have a professional partnership as follows:
- Past or present association as advisor or advisee.
- Collaboration on a project, publication, or grant proposal within the past 2 years (i.e., 2023 or later).
The workshop chairs and members will review conflicts to ensure the integrity of the reviewing process, adding conflicts where necessary and sanity-checking cases where conflicts do not appear justified. If there is no basis for PC conflicts provided by authors, those conflicts will be removed. Improperly identifying PC members as a conflict to avoid individual reviewers may lead to your paper being rejected. If you have concerns, please contact the PC chairs.
The 6-page research papers will go through a double-blind peer review by the program committee, where the identities of the authors are withheld from the reviewers. As an author, you are required to make a good-faith effort to preserve the anonymity of your submission while at the same time allowing the reader to fully grasp the context of related past work, including your own. Common sense and careful writing will go a long way toward preserving anonymity. Minimally, please take the following steps when preparing your submission:
- Remove the names and affiliations of authors from the title page.
- Remove acknowledgment of identifying names and funding sources.
- Use care in naming your files. Source file names (e.g., "John-Doe.dvi") are often embedded in the final output as readily accessible comments.
- Use care in referring to related work, particularly your own. Do not omit references to provide anonymity, as this leaves the reviewer unable to grasp the context. Instead, reference your past work in the third person, just as you would any other piece of related work by another author.
- Do not embed pointers to external sources (e.g., "public GitHub repositories") that leak author identity or affiliation.
The 3-page technical abstracts will go through a single-blind peer review by the program committee, where the identities of the authors and the affiliation are visible to the reviewers, while the identities of reviewers are withheld from the authors. This is because the 3-page technical abstracts allow authors to submit highlights of their previously published work, and will not appear as workshop publications in the ACM Digital Library.
Organizing Committee
| Chairs: | Jesse E. Simsarian Nokia Bell Labs, USA Massimo Tornatore Politecnico di Milano, Italy Yiting Xia Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany Zhizhen Zhong Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA |
| Web Chair: | Jialong Li Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany |
| Technical Program Committee: | TBD |