The volume offers an insider’s view of cutting-edge research in network systems, including methodologies with immense potential for interdisciplinary application. The contributors have all presented material at a series of workshops organized on behalf of Canada’s MITACS initiative, which funds projects and study grants in ‘mathematics for information technology and complex systems’. These proceedings include papers from workshops on financial networks, network security and cryptography, and social networks. MITACS has shown that the partly ghettoized nature of network systems research has led to duplicated work in discrete fields, and thus this initiative has the potential to save time and accelerate the pace of research in a number of areas of network systems research.