Network analysis is a general and cross-disciplinary approach to scientific inquiry on complex systems such as, for example, human social systems, the World Wide Web, power grids, electronic circuits, communication networks, railways and food webs. Abstractly, complex systems can be conceptualized as wholes of components with mutual interactions. These are addressed from the network-centric perspective in the investigation of complex systems. Accordingly, the latter have been studied, understood and explained in terms of interactions among their components. Hitherto, various aspects of interest in the establishment of network interactions have been taken into account across several domains and applicative contexts. However, the incorporation of component roles in an effort to advance our comprehension of complex systems has yet to be fully valued.

The aim of this Special Issue is to promote an in-depth understanding of roles in complex network analysis. To this end, we call for novel insights into challenging issues, emerging trends as well as long studied problems and tasks, which have been formulated so far without a focus on roles. We solicit original contributions, including theoretical as well as application-oriented studies. In particular, we encourage the development of innovative models, methods, techniques and tools, which account for roles and additional aspects of interest in a seamlessly unified manner. Of particular interest are those interdisciplinary approaches that promote synergism among viewpoints, developments and advances within diverse areas. We also welcome original and comprehensive reviews of the literature on role-aware network analysis, with a focus on envisaging an appropriate exploitation of roles to revisit previous research, address new problems and identify unexplored directions. Extensions of previously published works are also invited, provided that at least 40% of new material is devoted to significant and unprecedented contributions, which must be clearly summarized in the introduction.

Dr. Gianni Costa
Dr. Riccardo Ortale
Guest Editors

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• Network roles: foundations, theory, representation, discovery and interpretation
• Case studies and applications of networks roles
• Role-aware analytics of large-scale complex networks
• Role-aware community detection, anomaly discovery, link prediction and network completion
• Role-aware information diffusion and cascading behavior
• Roles in time-evolving and streaming networks
• Roles in influence, reputation and trust networks
• Roles in multi-layered and heterogeneous networks
• Roles in viral marketing
• Roles in uncertain networks
• Role-aware social recommendation, user profiling and user behavior modeling
• Roles in complex networks for community question-answering, IoT systems and physical infrastructures
• Roles in network attacks, vulnerability, resilience, robustness and reconstruction
• Roles in topic detection and tracking on networks
• Role-aware network embedding
• Role-aware visual representation of complex networks
• Roles in covert networks
• Roles in complex networks for mobility, healthcare, smart cities and smart grids
• Role-aware modeling, analysis, mining and testing of complex networks in any other scientific or applicative domain