December 2022 ISSN 2374-1082 December 2022 Global Communications Newsletter 1 GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS NEWSLETTER GCN The 8th IEEE International Conference on Network Soft- warization (IEEE NetSoft 2022) was held from June 27 to July 1, 2022 in Milan, Italy, one of the most vibrant cities in Europe. The conference was hosted by Politecnico di Milano in its his- torical downtown campus, during a week of beautiful (and very toasty) weather and against the backdrop of a vibrant University full of student life with courses in full swing. The theme of IEEE NetSoft 2022 was “Network Softwariza- tion Coming of Age: New Challenges and Opportunities”.  The theme acknowledges the fact that network softwarization has reached a certain level of maturity since the first incarnation of the conference almost a decade ago. At this point, network softwarization is part of the technical mainstream and there a substantive body of experience with large-scale commer- cial deployments that have left the experimental stages at the lab. This provides a solid foundation from which to stage the exploration of new frontiers to push the limits of network soft- warization even further, including but not limited to challenges regarding security, safety, trust and privacy in virtualized envi- ronments; advances in network programming methodologies, architectures, and languages; AI techniques to support network automation; or multi-tenant SDN/NFV. Given the general improvement of the COVID-19 pandemic situation around the world in general and in Europe and Italy in particular, NetSoft 2022 was organized as an in-person event to provide opportunities to network and renew friendships as well as create new ones in ways that previous (virtual) conference editions could not. For this reason, NetSoft 2022 featured an extensive social program to complement the technical part of the program, including welcome reception, conference banquet, and campus and city tours. Unfortunately, the pandemic is not over and not everybody was able to travel, hence IEEE NetSoft 2022 also welcomed and accommodated participation and presenta- tions from remote authors. All in all, 130 researchers turned out in person and were joined by another 80 colleagues from remote. The core of the conference ran from Tuesday to Thursday. It featured a lineup of 21 long papers selected from the open submission process, organized into six Technical Sessions with the topics of Deployment and Operations, 5G and URLLC, RAN and Optimization, Intelligence and Control, Resilience, and Security. These were complemented by two short-paper sessions (selected from submissions explicitly submitted as short papers, not relegated long papers) and two demo sessions that showcased prototypes and proof-of-concept implementations of ongoing research. The acceptance rate was 24.9%. The technical program was anchored by a range of inspiring keynote talks delivered by world-class researchers and practi- tioners. Walter Cerroni from the University of Bologna (Italy), had the honor of kicking things off, giving a retrospective look at how far Network Softwarization has come. His talk was followed by Nate Foster from Cornell University (USA) who discussed founda- tional challenges and opportunities regarding the implementation and deployment of networks whose behavior is verifiably correct. A crucial aspect of this concerns tool chains implementing prov- ably correct transformation rules along every step of the way. Francesc Guim from Intel (Spain) reflected on the topic of smart edge architectures, drawing particular attention to the increasing- ly important issue of sustainability and the need of networks to be very efficient in their energy usage. Kurt Tutschku from Ble- kinge Institute of Technology (Sweden) presented on the idea of using Blockchain-based marketplaces for network services. Sujata Banerjee from VMware Research (USA) and Dario Rossi from Huawei (France) rounded out the keynote lineup with discussions of data-driving networking as part of edge-to-cloud infrastructure, and of AI-native networking respectively. The keynotes were complemented by the Distinguished Expert Panel in which the theme of the conference (Network Softwariza- tion Coming of Age: New Challenges and Opportunities) was 8th IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization 2022 (IEEE NetSoft 2022), Milan, Italy by Alexander Clemm and Guido Maier, NetSoft 2022 General Co-Chairs, and Prosper Chemouil, NetSoft Steering Committee Chair CONFERENCE REPORT Prosper Chemouil, Steering Committee Chair, Guido Maier and Alexander Clemm, General Co-Chairs, before the first session of the conference Socializing during the coffee break