The German Research Foundation (DFG) granted a new research project on Geometric Selfish Network Creation (GEONET). It examines how large real-world networks emerge in the absence of a central governing authority where connections are being formed by selfish agents trying to maximize their own utility. The project aims to overcome limitations of previous theoretical work on this topic by incorporating the underlying geometry in which the agents are embedded. This geometry has a stong impact on the formed networks, for example, in many communication networks, including the internet. Tobias Friedrich and Pascal Lenzner are the principal investigators of the project, additionally Davide Bilò (University of Sassari) received a Mercator Fellowship, which he will use to visit the Algorithm Engineering group.
