Substantial Future Work

Seven Major Challenges Requiring Substantial Future Work

1. Dynamics, spatial location, and information propagation in network

Better understanding of the relationship between the architecture of a network and its function is need

2. Modeling and analysis of very large network

Tools, abstractions, and approximations are needed that allow reasoning about large-scale networks, as well as techniques for modeling networks characterized by noisy and incomplete data. 

3. Design and synthesis of networks. 

Techniques are needed to design or modify a network to obtain desired properties (such as the output properties discussed in the section "Derived Properties of Networks").

4. Increasing the level of rigor and mathematical structure. 

Many of the respondents to the questionnaire felt that the current state of the art in network science did not have an appropriately rigorous mathematical basis. 

5. Absracting common concepts across fields.

The disparate disciplines need common concepts defined across network scienece.

6. Better experiments and measurements of network structure.

Current data sets on large-scale networks entend to be sparse, and tools for investigating their structure and function are limited. 

7. Robustness and security of networks. 

These is a clear need to better understand and design networked systems that are both robust to variations in the components (including localized failures) and secure against hostil intent.