ITU researcher secures prestigious EU funding for research in theoretical computer science
Associate Professor Radu-Cristian Curticapean at the IT University of Copenhagen’s Computer Science department has received a 1.5 million Euro grant from the European Research Council to conduct research in the field of theoretical computer science.
Radu-Cristian CurticapeanComputer Science DepartmentResearchalgorithmsgrants
Written 22 November, 2022 08:19 by Theis Duelund Jensen
This year’s European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants were announced today and among the 408 researchers from universities across Europe is Associate Professor Radu-Cristian Curticapean from the Computer Science department at ITU. Radu-Cristian Curticapean’s research project Counting (with) homomorphisms has received 1.5 million Euros in funding.
Radu-Cristian Curticapean, who wrote his PhD on algorithms and complexity theory at Saarland University, has received the prestigious grant to conduct research in the field of theoretical computer science. Specifically, Counting (with) homomorphisms will examine the resource requirements – time and memory allocation – for computational problems that ask to count certain combinatorial objects.
“This is an abstract field of study, but basically this research project is about examining the number of possible solutions for given problems. For example, you might ask how many solutions a given Sudoku puzzle admits,” says Radu-Cristian Curticapean.
These so-called counting problems find applications in diverse areas like network analysis, machine learning, probabilistic databases, and statistical physics. They are linked to fundamental questions in complexity theory and often give rise to algorithmic breakthroughs on problems that are not as such about counting.
“The goal is to find upper and lower bounds on the resource requirements to solve counting problems. We wish to go beyond the state of the art in computational counting by building bridges between complexity theory and the mathematical theory of graph homomorphisms, which are structure-preserving maps between graphs,” says Radu-Cristian Curticapean.
The funding for the project will largely go to the hiring of personnel – throughout its five-year period, the project will employ three postdocs or PhD students, according to the researcher.
“Receiving the ERC Starting Grant is an honor and a sign of recognition. The funding makes it possible to systematically study research questions that I’ve been curious about for a long time. This is my first time heading a team, and I look forward to taking on this new role.”
The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. In total, ERC will be funding research via the Starting Grant instrument to the tune of 636 million Euro.
Theis Duelund Jensen, Press Officer, tel: 2555 0447, email: thej@itu.dk