Dr. Eric Katz and Dr. Laura Sanita from the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization have been named recipients of this year's Early Researcher Awards. A total of 14 researchers were selected for this award from the University of Waterloo.
The Early Researcher Awards is a world leading, multidisciplinary program that supports early career researchers through attracting the best and brightest researchers and keeping homegrown talent in Ontario, while investing in, generating, and attracting a workforce with first-rate skills in science, engineering, creative arts, business, and entrepreneurship. Applicants are selected based on a variety of guidelines including development of research talent, quality of research, excellence of the researcher, and provincial impact.
Project descriptions
Dr.
Eric
Katz
Tropical
Geometry:
Structure
and
Degeneration
Award:
$140,000
The mathematical area of algebraic geometry concerns algebraic varieties which are solution sets of systems of polynomial equations. These systems arise in engineering problems and cannot be solved directly. Given an algebraic variety, tropical geometry produces a simpler object, a tropical variety, made of points, line segments, and their higher-dimensional analogues. Tropical varieties capture a surprising amount of data about the original variety and encode ways of simplifying the polynomial system which is important for approximating solutions to the system. The focus of this proposal is furthering Ontario's strength in pure mathematics, scientific computation, and computer algebra.
Dr.
Laura
Sanita
New
algorithmic
approaches
for
network
design
problems
Award:
$140,000
Communication
networks
have
dramatically
changed
the
way
we
communicate,
act,
and
live.
They
contribute
heavily
to
growth
and
productivity
of
a
country,
as
has
been
assessed
by
many
research
evaluations
in
recent
years.
For
this
reason,
efficient
network
design
techniques
have
a
huge
technological
and
economic
impact
for
Ontario.
Dr.
Sanita and
the
HQP
team
will
design
new
algorithms
for
network
connectivity
programs
and
influence
propagation
processes
through
social
networks,
and
develop
efficient
solvers
for
network
routing
problems.
The
techniques
developed
in
this
project
will
improve
network
efficiency
for
the
benefit
of
Ontarians.