TOC4Deep will bring together three early-stage researchers from the major applied and computational mathematics groups in the UNA Europa network. This project is the inaugural collaboration between the applicants.
The involved research groups currently represent a total in excess of 75 faculty members, 15 postdoctoral researchers, and 100 doctoral students. Despite these large numbers, active collaborations between these groups are limited. There is nevertheless a great opportunity for deeper collaborations due to both the overlap and complementarity in research interests at the different groups. TOC4Deep covers several topics of active research in the involved groups, including, among others, low-rank matrix and tensor decompositions, mathematics of data science, numerical analysis, numerical linear and multilinear algebra, optimal control problems, optimization, and the solution of ordinary and partial differential equations. The cooperation among our groups launched by TOC4Deep will be leveraged as a common anchor to initiate future collaborations.
As part of this project, a one-week visit in each of the three institutions will be organized. During these visits, we will host a morning mini-workshop, in hybrid online-onsite format and open to all researchers from the institutes in the UNA Europa network, where the hosting applicant and three faculty members (one from each participating institute) will give a broad overview talk related to their research. The goal is to raise awareness through these mini-workshops of the research performed at the institutes participating in this project. In line with the UNA Europa Conduct research for the future goal, we will encourage spontaneous discussions and further idea exchange that could lead to new, productive connections beyond the timeline of the TOC4Deep research project.
We will furthermore leverage this project for educational purposes, which supports the UNA Europa Learn for Life goal. Specifically, we target deepening the collaboration between the institutes for student mobility at the Master level. Since the United Kingdom is a highly sought-after destination for students from the continent, setting up bilateral exchange agreements (formerly in the Erasmus exchange program) with institutes from the United Kingdom is generally a tough process. With the TOC4Deep project within the UNA Europa framework, and supported by our respective chairs of departments and schools, we can make a very compelling case for initiating a bilateral agreement between KU Leuven’s Master of Mathematical Engineering and the University of Edinburgh’s Computational Applied Mathematics degree programme.
In the longer term and in the spirit of UNA Europa’s vision, we envisage setting up a pan-university advanced course Current Topics in Applied and Computational Mathematics in which researchers from the three involved institutes will cover current trends and topics. Our consortium would be very well suited for this initiative, as some thought-leaders like D. Higham (Edinburgh), W. Michiels (KU Leuven), and V. Simoncini (Bologna), among many others, are members of the involved groups.
To conclude, the mutual scientific exchange with external, local partners like Brainnwave and Neurality embodies the UNA Europa Connect with our Communities goal.