€7.5 Million ERC Synergy Grant | Joël Ouaknine
Joël Ouaknine, left, with Valérie Berthé and Florian Luca
Joël Ouaknine, an Emmy Network Fellow by Special Election here at Keble, was recently awarded an ERC Synergy Grant worth €7.5 million over six years for his project ‘Dynamical and Arithmetical Model Checking’ (DynAMiCs). This interdisciplinary project is run by Professor Ouaknine as the Coordinating Principal Investigator, alongside professors Valérie Berthé from the CNRS and Florian Luca from Stellenbosch University.
This year’s ERC (European Research Council) Synergy scheme offered €571 million as part of the EU’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme. The scheme, established to enable and foster collaboration between experts in some of the most complex scientific disciplines, encourages the exploration of new scientific horizons. Only 10% of the 548 project proposals were selected to receive this prestigious award.
As one of the exceptional proposals to be funded, DynAMiCs aims to revolutionise the algorithmic theory of discrete linear dynamical systems (which form the basis for key computational challenges in a variety of fields, like AI and theoretical biology) and related formalisms, by combining expertise in verification, symbolic dynamics, and number theory. It specifically aims to significantly expand the classes of systems and properties that can be handled algorithmically through model checking, tackle longstanding open problems, such as the Skolem Problem and the Pisot Conjecture, and open new lines of research at the confluence of these fields within mathematics and theoretical computer science.
On receiving the ERC Synergy Grant, Professor Ouaknine shared, “My colleagues and I are tremendously excited; this grant will enable us to assemble a really strong team of mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists, which we believe is the right combination to unlock a number of hard, longstanding open algorithmic problems”.
More information about this award and the project can be found here.
