Today we rely on a myriad of natural and engineered
interconnected systems in our everyday life. Networks have become a
paradigmatic way of representing complex systems across diverse
scientific disciplines and application domains, where the interaction
structure is itself intricate and may evolve along with the system's
dynamics.  From a systems and control perspective, this reality poses
formidable research challenges and opportunities in order to guarantee
the reliable, efficient, and safe operation of network systems.  This
talk describes our progress on understanding the mechanisms that make
complex networks function they way they do and on engineering networks
with predictable behavior.  We focus on scenarios where information is
distributed across multiple layers and only partially available to
individual agents.  We study the role played in the overall system
performance by the structure of intra- and inter-connections among
network layers, the coordination of decisions to optimize aggregate
network performance, and the synthesis of resource-aware strategies
for the efficient use of the available resources.