Abstract: Network Design Problems, which concern designing minimum cost networks that satisfy given set of ``connectivity constrains'', are very well studied in computer science and combinatorial optimization. Almost all these problems are NP-hard, and a number of results are known about them in the realm of approximation algorithms. Parameterized Complexity is a different framework for dealing with computational intractability, where typically we try to design fast algorithms to solve the problem on those instances which admit a ``small cost solution''. In this talk we will look at some recent results on the parameterized complexity of network design problems, and future directions for research.
