Network Science and Engineering  (NetSE)

CONTACTS

See program guidelines for contact information.

SYNOPSIS

In the past few decades, our network infrastructure has undergone radical changes.  It has evolved from a small number of interconnected computer networks to a global socio-technical infrastructure upon which society now depends.  Using this network of heterogeneous networks, people communicate and interact spontaneously in cyber space and with the cyber physical world, conducting business and providing services, managing their day-to-day lives, expanding and enriching their social circles, learning and playing.  In the future, global society will increasingly rely on socio-technical networks designed in harmony with societal values and economic viability, with enhanced security, privacy, resilience, availability and manageability, and the ability to incorporate as yet unforeseen technologies, applications and services. 

The Network Science and Engineering (NetSE) program has been created to develop the science and engineering of these networks, yielding new scientific understanding about their complexity and informing their future design.  The program subsumes and expands upon the former CISE programmatic areas of Future INternet Design (FIND), Science for the Internet Next Generation (SING) and Next-Generation Information Systems (NGNI).  NetSE specifically challenges individuals and teams with different perspectives, e.g. theoreticians and experimentalists, as well as different domain expertise, e.g. mathematicians, information, computer, social and economic scientists, and engineers, to come together to address this important challenge. 

NetSE seeks proposals focused on developing the scientific foundations necessary to understand and reason about socio-technical networks.  Of particular interest are frameworks that explicitly incorporate human values at multiple levels and scale, inform the development of applications, services and network technologies, and give coherence to the highly diverse ways users might create and access information in the future.  NetSE also encourages research proposals focused on exploring network architecture innovations.  Encouraged to take  "clean slate" approaches unconstrained by the current Internet, researchers are empowered to rethink network functions, layers and abstractions in the context of a range of scientific, technical and social challenges and opportunities. NetSE emphasizes integrative activities focused on creating and synthesizing network components into theoretically grounded architectures that address fundamental policy and design trade-offs, support sound economic models, and promote social benefits. Future networks must also be designed to provide users with timely and coherent access to massive quantities of highly distributed information. Consequently, the NetSE program encourages research on Internet-scale, topologically-aware models for accessing, processing and aggregating multiple high-volume information flows; and on cognitive capabilities, context-awareness, and architectures that enable the discovery, invocation and composition of globally distributed, highly evolving services and information systems. These new kinds of models, capabilities, and architectures in turn enable the exploration of new applications that provide information based on both content and context, and the improvement of existing classes of applications, such as gaming, virtual worlds, augmented reality and tele-presence.  

NetSE proposals should include a description of how research ideas will be validated, for example through formal verification, simulation, modeling, proof-of-concept development, prototype testing on a testbed, or when applicable, usability evaluation involving human subjects.

Network Science and Engineering Point of Contact:  Darleen L. Fisher, Point of Contact, Network Science and Engineering Program, telephone: (703) 292-8950, email: dlfisher@nsf.gov

Funding Opportunities for Network Science and Engineering (NeTSE):

CISE Cross-Cutting Programs: FY 2010  NSF 09-558

THIS PROGRAM IS PART OF

CISE Cross-Cutting Programs: FY 2010