The Department of Artificial Intelligence of the HUN-REN Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics (Rényi Institute) and the doctoral school of mathematics of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) participate in a winning Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Networks 2022 project from 2024 to 2027. The main topic of the cooperation within the consortium is the understanding of the higher-order correlation of network dynamics.
Ágnes Backhausz, a research fellow of the Department of Artificial Intelligence of Rényi Institute and an assistant professor of ELTE will participate in the 4-year project starting in January 2024, together with a doctoral student from ELTE.
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Networks of the Horizon Europe framework program supports researcher mobility via the members of the winning consortium simultaneously implementing a joint research project. In addition, it also supports the training of highly qualified doctoral candidates to improve students’ creativity, increase their innovation capacity, and enhance their employment chances in the long term.
The primary goal of the BeyondTheEdge international project is to investigate dynamical systems where more than two vertices in a network can participate in interactions together, and to look for various applications of such processes. For example, during an epidemic process, usually one individual usually infects another one, but if we examine the spread of opinions in a social network, the process might be based on the relationship of more than two individuals: three family members who have the same opinion may persuade the fourth member. Examining higher-order interactions like this is also crucial in neuroscience: fMRI and other research methods have shown that biological processes in the brain often require the cooperation of more than two areas or groups of cells. In the current project, these phenomena are mainly studied by mathematical methods, for example, by using graph limit theory, differential equations, and spectral theory of matrices. In particular, the graduate student working in Budapest will work on questions about the theory of hypergraph limits, to develop this theory, and to study its possible applications for the spreading process.
Due to the specific nature of the program, the doctoral students will also spend 6-8-12 months conducting research in one of the other institutions participating in the consortium. In this way, doctoral students can gain a broader, international professional perspective in hypergraph research, and the program also offers a very good opportunity to build scientific connections.
In July 2022, Dr. Christian Bick (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) held a few-day workshop to which he invited scientists conducting research related to the higher-order interactions of networks, the topic of the application meant to be submitted in November 2022. Mathematicians, neuroscientists and biologists presented their current research topics to each other. There are 9 supported institutes/universities from 9 countries, and 9 other affiliated partner institutions participating in the project submitted to the MSCA Doctoral Networks and awarded by 2.5 million euros.
Coordinator:
1. Stichting VU (Netherlands)
Beneficiaries:
2. Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics (Hungary)
3. Universidade do Porto (Portugal)
4. Technische Universität München (Germany)
5. Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II (Italy)
6. L'Université d'Aix-Marseille (France)
7. CENTAI Institute S. p. A. (Italy)
8. Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain)
9. Kadir Has Üniversitesi (Turkey)
Associated partners:
10. Stichting VUMC (Netherlands)
11. Universiteit van Amsterdam (Netherlands)
12. Fundação de Apoio à Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil)
13. Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (Germany)
14. The Regents of the University of California (United States)
15. Centrum voor Wetenschaps- en Technologiestudies B.V. (Netherlands)
16. British Telecommunications PLC (United Kingdom)
17. Politecnico di Torino (Italy)
18. Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary)