Bocconi Gains an ERC Grant and a Professor of Computer Science

Starting from 1 September, Bocconi University will host an Advanced ERC Grant assigned to Luca Trevisan, a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley who will join Bocconi in the next academic year. The European Research Council announced the result of its last call yesterday.

The research project Spectral and Optimization Techniques for Robust Recovery, Combinational Constructions, and Distributed Algorithms (SO-ReCoDi) has been funded with €1.97mln.

How can we discover structure in noisy data? How can we construct compact representations of large networks, while retaining most of the information about their link structure? What can and cannot be achieved by networks of agents with limited computational and communication power? SO-ReCoDi approaches these seemingly unrelated questions by developing their common mathematical foundations, in order to create new algorithms, to prove new structural results and to form new connections with pure mathematics.

«I am excited to return to Italy, after more than twenty years, and to help establish a theoretical computer science group at Bocconi», Prof. Trevisan said. «This generous grant from the European Commission will support several young researchers, and it will bring to Milan scholars from all over the world to visit and collaborate with our group». He's informally started to recruit postdocs and visitors with a post on his blog, in theory: «If you (...) have always wanted to visit me and work together on spectral methods, approximation algorithms, graph theory or graph algorithms, but you felt that Berkeley had insufficiently many Leonardo mural paintings and opera houses, and that it was too far from the Alps, then now you are in luck!».

Professor Trevisan's is the 32nd ERC Grant hosted by Bocconi since the inception of the European program, in 2007.