The Army Research Office has awarded the grant Multilayer network embeddings and applications to real-world problems to CNetS faculty Santo Fortunato and Filippo Radicchi. The project lies at the interface between artificial intelligence and network science and aims at developing embeddings of multilayer networks in vector space. While graph embeddings have become very popular over the past decade, most of the research in this area focuses on the analysis of isolated graphs. However, networks in the real world do not exist in isolation, but they are coupled with other networks. For example in social media, the same person may interact with different individuals depending on the online platform. 

Embedding multilayer networks does not generally reduce to combining embeddings of the networks of the individual layers. The task is complex and requires innovative solutions. While the project is mostly theoretical, co-PIs Fortunato and Radicchi will be exploring some application areas as well: network robustness, identification of influencers, navigability. 

The total budget of the award is 449,501 USD, the project's duration is three years.