INDIS 2026 Workshop Program

(updated Oct 5nd, 2026)

Workshop Date: Sunday, November 15th, 2026 - Chicago, Illinois, USA

Location: In-person in room 175a

Detailed Schedule on the SC26 Website: Link

Agenda for the INDIS 2026 Workshop (All times are in CST)

(09:00 am) Welcome and SCinet Architecture (SCinet Chair) [slides]
(09:10 am) Featured Speaker: Ben Brown (DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research) [slides]
(Session lead: Nik Sultana)

(10:00 am) Coffee Break

(10:30 am) Security Panel:
(Moderated by: )
- Adam Slagell (ESnet): Chief Security Officer at the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), where he leads cybersecurity strategy and operations for one of the world's premier high-performance research and education networks. [slides]
- Anita Nikolich (NCSA, UIUC): Director of Research and Technology Innovation and a Research Scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's School of Information Sciences, with an affiliate appointment at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). [slides]
- Ryan Walker (UIUC): Manager of Security Operations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he leads teams responsible for protecting the university's enterprise systems, research infrastructure, and digital assets. [slides]
- Michael Skwarek (Argonne National Laboratory): Deputy Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at Argonne National Laboratory, where he leads the laboratory's cybersecurity strategy and enterprise information technology initiatives. [slides]
- Matt Kwiatkowski (Fermi Lab): Division Head and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), where he leads the laboratory's cybersecurity strategy, governance, and enterprise security operations. [slides]

(11:30 am) Flash-talk session (including student submission)
(Session lead: )
1. "National Data Platform, National Research Platform and Open Science Data Federation: How they collectively enable data-intensive science" - Fabio Andrijauskas, Frank Würthwein, S. Curt Dodds [slides, paper]
2. "SciNet: Science-Aware Network Operations for Research Networks" - Mariam Kiran, K. K. K. K. Ramakrishnan, Harvey Newman, Puneet Sharma, Rafael Ferreira Da Silva [slides, paper]
3. "Measured WAN Traffic Reduction from Federated Edge AI in a Distributed Cosmic-Ray Sensor Network" - Carlyn Lee, Harvey Newman, Yifan Wu, Spencer Axani [slides, paper]
4. "Characterizing Network Behavior of Distributed LLM Inference on a Four Node Edge Cluster" - Manas Das [slides, paper]
5. "Network-Aware Caching in Distributed CMS XRootD Systems via Data-Driven Forecasting" - Sarat Sasank Barla, Byrav Ramamurthy, Derek Weitzel [slides, paper]
6. [Student track submission] "Cross-Fabric Policy Reasoning for Hybrid InfiniBand/Ethernet HPC Systems" - Vedant Sawal, Anna Giannakou [slides, paper]

(12:00 am) Full paper session (Network Management)
(Session lead: )
1. "Fine-Grained Application-Aware Congestion Mitigation with Telemetry-Tuned Weighted SRv6 Policies" - Shashwitha Puttaswamy, Mariam Kiran [slides, paper]
2. "LLM-Driven Root Cause Analysis of BGP and BFD Flap Events" - Hadi Sahin, Jeronimo Bezerra, Renata Frez, Italo Brito, Vasilka Chergarova, Luis Marin Vera, Gretel De la Peña, Julio Ibarra [slides, paper]

(12:30 pm) Lunch Break

(02:00 pm) Full paper session (Infrastructure)
(Session lead: )
1. "Towards Efficient Vertical Federated Learning on Distributed Scientific Infrastructure" - Evangelos Pipilikas, Alexandros Koufakis, Ana Oprescu [slides, paper]
2. "FAB-Cache: A Programmable Multi-Site Caching Service for Remote Dataset Retrieval Using FABRIC" - Pinyi Shi, Vaiden Logan, Dakota Morgan, James Griffioen, Zongming Fei, Kenneth Calvert [slides, paper]
3. "ORBIT: An AI-Powered Assistant for NOC Operations in a Data-Intensive Science Network" - Bin Dong, Sukhada Gholba, Brooklin Gore, Shawn Kwang, David Mitchell, Samuel Oehlert, Garrett Stewart, Brendan White, Luke Baker, Edward Balas, Britt Gathright, Chin Guok, Jon-Paul Herron, John MaCauley, Scott Richmond, Chris Robb, Chris Tracy, Kesheng Wu [slides, paper]
4. "SC26 GNA-G Network Research Exhibition and Partner NREs at the Caltech/ESnet Booth" - Harvey Newman [slides, paper]

(03:00 pm) Coffee Break

(03:30 pm) Quantum Panel
(Moderated by: Preeti Chalsani)
- Hanhee Paik: Director, Quantum Algorithm Centers and IBM Research Academic Collaboration Program
- Aaron Lott: Principal Technical Product and Program Manager, HPE Quantum, HPE Labs
- Caitlyn Carnahan: VP of Quanutm Software CTO, Infleqtion
- Jean Utke: Data Scientist - Technical Director, Allstate

(04:15 pm) Full paper session (Network Measurement)
(Session lead: )
1. "A Multi-Task Benchmark for Time Series Foundation Models on R\&E Backbone Telemetry" - Gretel De la Peña, Hadi Sahin, Renata Frez, Italo Brito, Vasilka Chergarova, Luis Marin, Jeronimo Bezerra, Julio Ibarra [slides, paper]
2. "Who Benefits from Federation? Heterogeneous Gains in Cross-Operator Network Traffic Representation Learning" - Mohammad Arafath Uddin Shariff, Byrav Ramamurthy [slides, paper]

(04:45 pm) Featured Speaker: Deep Medhi (Program Director, National Science Foundation) [slides]
(Session lead: Nik Sultana)
- Title: Research Infrastructure as enabler of Science
- Abstract: While much scientific research is possible using traditional mechanisms (such as paper and pencil), research infrastructures play an important role in enabling new science that's not possible otherwise. This talk will cover this aspect, with a bend towards data-intensive science through networking and distributed systems research infrastructures.

(05:15 pm) Outstanding Paper Awards & Closing Remarks
(Session leads: Nik Sultana and Ezra Kissel)

(5:30 pm) End of workshop