A NetAI Manifesto (Part I): Less Explorimentation, More Science

Abstract

The application of the latest techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to improve and automate the decision-making required for solving realworld network security and performance problems (NetAI, for short) has generated great excitement among networking researchers. However, network operators have remained very reluctant when it comes to deploying NetAI-based solutions in their production networks, mainly because the black-box nature of the underlying learning models forces operators to blindly trust these models without having any understanding of how they work, why they work, or when they don't work (and why not). Paraphrasing [1], we argue that to overcome this roadblock and ensure its future success in practice, NetAI "has to get past its current stage of explorimentation, or the practice of poking around to see what happens, and has to start employing tools of the scientific method."