Professor Yannis Smaragdakis of the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications received an ERC Advanced Grant, a prestigious research distinction.
The ERC Advanced Grant, i.e., the "big" funding of the European Research Council (ERC), is probably the most sought-after research funding globally. It is a generous funding program (up to 2.5 million euros) exclusively for scientific research, practically without bureaucratic restrictions or commitments to specific results.
According to the statistics of the European Research Council for Greece, this project will be:
- The first ERC Advanced Grant in Informatics, and the first in the PE--"Physical Sciences and Engineering" overall, since 2012-13.
- The first ERC Advanced Grant of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
The title of the research project is Program Intelligence, Declaratively and Symbolically (PINDESYM), or "Declaratively and Symbolically Understanding of Programs". The purpose of the research is to use mathematical logic (in the form of a language that can be processed automatically by parallel computers) to express algorithms that can understand all possible behaviours of a program. Research algorithms will combine program models based on specific numerical values, symbolic expressions, and understanding through machine learning algorithms.