László Lovász, Albert-László Barabási and Czech scientist Jaroslav Nešetřil have jointly won a 6 year research programme grant worth almost 10 million euros in order to gain a better understanding of the networks surrounding our everyday lives. The MTA Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, the Central European University and the Charles University of Prague will provide the institutional background for the project.
This is the ninth big project of our Institute that gets funded by the European Research Council.
The project was awarded the most prestigious of European Commission-funded grants, the ERC Synergy Grant. This program, launched in 2012 and 2013 on a trial basis, was launched again after four years of intense preparation, in 2017 by the European Research Council.
The Synergy Grant aims to promote cooperation among different disciplines in a way that the research results may later form the basis of new disciplines. The goal of the project is to build upon the newest results of network science and graph theory, bringing researchers from each field together to better understand the workings of large complex networks. The results can have an impact on multiple disciplines, so the researchers plan to consult with brain scientists, medical doctors, cell biologists, physicists, experts in communication, social networks, transportation and computer science. In November 2017, 295 applications were submitted from all over Europe and the 27 winning projects engage 88 lead researchers who will carry out their projects at 63 universities and research centres in 17 countries across the European Research Area, but there was only one succesful application from those 13 coutries that joined the European Union in 2004 or later. Moreover, there is one single selected proposal in the area of mathematics even including the 2012 and 2013 pilot projects
You can read more details on the research project at the website of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
The press release of the European Research Council can be found here.
The list of all selected proposals can be downloaded from here.
The description of three project examples (including the one of Rényi, CEU and Charles University) is available here.