As a networking researcher, working with computer networks day in and day out, you probably have rarely paused to reflect on the surprisingly difficult question of "What is a network?" For example, would you consider a bio-chemical system to be a network? How about a social network? Or a water supply network? Or the electrical grid? After all, all of these share some aspects in common with a computer network: they can be represented as a graph and they carry a flow (of chemical signals, messages, water, and electrons, respectively) from one or more sources to one or more destinations. So, shouldn't we make them equally objects of study by SIGCOMM members?
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