First Danish computer scientist awarded ERC Advanced Grant
Professor Kim Guldstrand Larsen, of Aalborg University’s Department of Computer Science, Denmark, has been awarded an Advanced Grant of €2.5m from the European Research Council (ERC).
Larsen has received the funding for an innovative proposal concerning how IT of the future can handle complex systems in the real world. His research project, LASSO (Learning, Analysis, SynthesiS and Optimization of Cyber-Physical Systems), will focus on cyber-physical systems.
Computer scientists at Aalborg University already work with companies in the energy and transport sectors on their specific problems with cyber-physical systems in planning public transport and co-ordinating energy consumption and production.
“There we’re using the knowledge and the tools we already have,” said Larsen. “But in this new project, we have to get hold of basic techniques, algorithms and mathematical models so we can improve them and create a new generation of scalable tools.”
LASSO will achieve this by combining two computer science disciplines. The first, model checking, is Larsen’s area of expertise and uses thorough, but therefore complex and time-consuming, models of reality to provide precise answers.
The second discipline is machine intelligence (MI). This uses a form of artificial intelligence to enable systems to make the best possible decisions from the available information and a probability calculation.
The five-year project will be co-ordinated with the activities of IDEA4CPS, a Danish-Chinese centre of excellence which also focuses on cyber-physical systems.
Larsen is the first Danish computer scientist to be awarded the coveted grant, which is the ERC’s highest recognition.
