NeST Initiative

The main purpose of our initiative is to establish a well-founded and vibrant environment that will provide a vehicle for stimulating applications of foundational research in network sciences and technologies.

We live in networks. Networks are naturally embedded in biological, chemical, physical and digital systems, economy, social relationships and many human made complex structures such as the Internet. A network-based approach to modelling, understanding and processing of surrounding environments has a strong foundation in Mathematical and Computing Sciences.

This approach also relies on methodologies developed in Economics and Game Theory because the participants populating networks are very often autonomous and interested in achieving their own particular goals.

Thus, apart from high quality foundational research explorations, this initiative targets knowledge exchange, including interdisciplinary research activities that will involve academics from our universities, partnering institutions in UK and overseas, industry and members of the public.

The new centre will aim to stimulate and nest interdisciplinary projects based on network research and engineering, to create a critical mass for large projects targeting challenging problems, and in turn to put the University of Liverpool on a map of world-leading institutions that recognise importance of network-based sciences and engineering.