The ERC Starting Grant of the European Research Council (ERC) is one of the most prestigious research awards in Europe. With its yearly awards, the ERC funds excellent researchers that conduct highly innovative research projects. One of this year’s Starting Grants, worth 1.5 mio. euros, has been given to Sebastian Forster, professor at the Department of Computer Sciences. Forster is known to the scientific community for his pioneering work in recent years on network algorithms. The financial support by the ERC gives him the opportunity to do research on big data algorithms within the funded project “Dynamic Algorithms Against Strong Adversaries”.

The goal of Forster’s project is to design novel algorithms for scenarios in which the input data is “dynamic”, i.e., is regularly undergoing changes. The challenge for such algorithms lies in efficiently updating the output of the computation after each change to the data without having to perform a costly recomputation from scratch. Prof. Forster will use the ERC’s funding to increase the size of his team and to continue performing cutting-edge research on algorithms at the University of Salzburg.