Saturday, 17 July 2021 Acad. Prof. Jean-Pierre Bourguignon guest at UP
On Friday, 16 July 2021, the University of Primorska hosted the President of the European Research Council (ERC), Acad. Prof. Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, whose visit in Slovenia is part of a wider event dedicated to science and research in the frame of the Slovenian presidency of the EU Council. The panel discussions with Prof. Bourguignon about research in Europe in view of pandemic was attended by UP leadership, and by representatives of other Slovenian scientific research institutions, among them Prof. Zdravko Kačič, Rector of the University of Maribor, Prof. Mladen Franko, Vice-Rector for Education at the University of Nova Gorica, Prof. dr. Roman Jerala, from the National Institute of Chemistry, Dr. Tomaž Boh, Director General of the Directorate for Science at the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports (MIZŠ), Dr. Andreja Umek Venturini, ERC contact at MIZŠ, and representatives of UP members and InnoRenew CoE Research Institute.
The first part of the discussion, led by Prof. Tomaž Pisanski, was focused on excellence in science and on different criteria for evaluating the quality of scientific research, where individual scientific fields shall not be compared with each other. Prof. Jean-Pierre Bourguignon invited researchers to be ambitious and dare to take risks, to apply and realize new ideas. »Don’t be conservative,« he said.
Continue to read the article on UP website.
During his visit, Prof. Bourguignon had a meeting also with UP FAMNIT students and researchers.
Prof. Bourguignon with UP FAMNIT researchers and Prof. Daniel Kráľ, holder of two ERC grants, with his doctoral students, who are currently on a research visit at Famnit.
Wednesday, 14 July 2021 UP FAMNIT once again hosts top researchers in the field of Graph theory
Professor Daniel Kráľ again visited the University of Primorska, as part of research work in the field of graph theory, where he collaborates with Assist. Prof. Matjaž Krnc (UP FAMNIT).
Prof. Kráľ, a renowned expert in the field of graph theory, comes from the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University in Brno, where he has received a newly established Donald Ervin Knuth Professorship. He is the co-heading the Laboratory of Discrete Methods and Algorithms (DIMEA) and holds an honorary professorship at the University of Warwick, where he was affiliated with its research center (Center for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications - DIMAP).
In 2010 he received the ERC Starting Grant for the CCOSA project (Classes of Combinatorial Objects - from Structure to Algorithms), and in 2015 the ERC Consolidator grant for the LADIST project (Large Discrete Structures). He is currently also the editor of two prestigious journals - Advances in Combinatorics and SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics (SIDMA).
Prof. Kráľ already visited UP FAMNIT last July, and he was once again accompanied by his doctoral and postdoctoral students. This time by Jake Cooper, Martin Kurečka, dr. Frederik Garbe and dr. Samuel Mohr. Together with Assist. Prof. Krnc they are continuing their well-established work in the field of graph theory, and their current scientific results were also highlighted in an Abel lecture by László Lovász, this year's Abel laureate who held a lecture at the recent 8th European Congress of Mathematics.
Guest were today welcomed by the Rector of the University of Primorska, Prof. Klavdija Kutnar, by the Dean of UP FAMNIT, Assoc. Prof. Ademir Hujdurović, and by Prof. Dragan Marušič. They discussed their work within the mathematics departments of both Universities, as well as the opportunities and challenges of the application process associated with ERC projects.
The Rector of the University of Primorska further expressed her enthusiasm for the excellent work of the research group so far and emphasized the importance of further strengthening of international cooperation.
Friday, 9 July 2021 The American Mathematical Monthly published a mathematical problem proposed by UP FAMNIT student Besfort Shala
American Mathematical Monthly (AMM) has published a mathematical problem in the field of Number Theory that was proposed by Besfort Shala (3rd year of Mathematics, BSc).
AMM is a very prestigious math journal and one of the sections of the journal is dedicated to Olympiad style problem solving. »I follow that section regularly,« said Besfort Shala, »and decided to submit some of my own problems, one of which was admitted and published. It’s not easy to get problems published as they must combine elements of elegance and difficulty well. Since it is a specific problem, it didn’t take me so much time to make it while the question popped up naturally when I was considering and trying to solve some other problems. I’m not sure if it means a lot about my future research/work but it’s certainly motivating to keep proposing and solving problems. As far as I am aware, it is the first publication of UP FAMNIT in this journal, meaning it might help the faculty reach higher recognition.«
The journal is available here.
We are very proud of Besfort's achievement and, since he is about to complete his studies at Famnit, we wish him all the best in his future research work in the mathematical world!
Wednesday, 7 July 2021 Two new projects for scientific research cooperation with Bosnia and Herzegovina
University of Primorska has obtained five new projects for the scientific research cooperation between Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina from July 2021 to June 2023. The Slovenian Research Agency will co-finance projects in the field of archaeology, economics and mathematics.
The public tender co-finances mutual visits of researchers from Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, that are cooperating in joint scientific research projects with the aim of strengthening cooperation between the two countries, increasing the mobility of researchers and the submission of applications of EU and other international grants.
The co-funded projects led by UP FAMNIT and UP IAM employees are:
Title: Analysis of bent Boolean functions in terms of new metrics
Institutions: UP Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies, and University of Tuzla, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
UP project leader: dr. Samir Hodžić
Field: mathematics
The main goal of the project is to revise the notion of a metric used for defining the distance between Boolean functions, with the special focus on achieving the bentness property. Traditionally, the well-known Hamming metric is used to define the distance between two Boolean functions, which is defined as the cardinality of the set of inputs on which given two functions differ. Based on this metric, we say that a Boolean function is bent if it stands at maximal distance to the space of linear functions. Hence, the bentness property of Boolean functions is directly related to the definition of the underlying metric.
Title: Semi-simples algebras associated to directed graphs and its applications
Institutions: UP Institute Andrej Marušič and University in Zenica, Faculty of Philosophy
Project leader at UP: dr. Safet Penjić
Field: mathematics
Matrix multiplication (MM) is a basic operation of linear algebra, which has numerous applications to the theory and practice of computation. Importance of applications are due to the fact that MM is a substantial part of several successful algorithms for other computational problems of linear algebra and combinators, such as the solution of a system of linear equations, matrix inversion, the evaluation of the determinant of a matrix, Boolean MM and the transitive closure of a graph. In this project we will study vector space of matrices generated by adjacency matrix of a directed graph.
Monday, 5 July 2021 The traditional international summer school in mathematics at Rogla has come to an end
Last week an international summer school in mathematics took place at Rogla, which this time was one of the accompanying events of the recently successfully concluded 8th European Congress of Mathematics - 8ECM. The main goal of the scientific meeting entitled »Graphs and Groups, Geometries and GAP (G2G2) Summer School – External Satellite Conference of 8ECM«, which took place between 27 June and 2 July, was to bring together experts and students to exchange ideas and to enrich their mathematical horizons with focus on computational methods in mathematics and vertex operator algebras. Among more than 50 the participants were doctoral students, other young mathematicians as well as more experienced researchers.
The G2G2 organization, whose main organizers in previous years were UP FAMNIT and UP IAM, this year also involved recognised universities from Russia, the United Kingdom and Italy: Sobolev Institute of Mathematics, Novosibirsk State University, Krasovskii Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics, Ural Federal University, Imperial College London, Department of Mathematics and Physics – Catholic University of the Sacred Heart – Brescia in Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics – University of Udine.
Unlike previous summer schools at Rogla, this year's expert committee consisted entirely of recognised experts from abroad: Clara Franchi (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Italija), Alexander A. Ivanov (Imperial College London, ZK), Elena Konstantinova (Sobolev Institute of Mathematics, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Science, Novosibirsk State University, Rusija) in Mario Mainardis (University of Udine, Italija).
The program was also live-streamed via the internet, and participants who were present at Rogla had the opportunity to discuss, socialize and solve open problems in the field of mathematics in person. In addition to two sets of minicourses, the program also included contributions from invited speakers and other participants.
Summer schools in mathematics for doctoral students at Rogla have more than a decade of tradition and strong international participation. This year, with the involvement of foreign universities in the organization of the event and program preparation, represents an important contribution to achieving the goal of internationalization of the University of Primorska.
Thursday, 1 July 2021 First graduate of MSc study programme Data Science
On 28 June 2021, Lisi Qarkaxhija succesfully completed the MSc study programme Data Science with the thesis Network based predictive modelling (supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Miklós Kreśz, PhD and co-supervisor: Assist. Lászlo Hajdu). As part of his thesis, he looked into the problem of forecasting the number of citations a scientific work will receive - predicting the citation count of papers is a well-known and well-studied problem for which various approaches have been proposed.
Lisi Qarkaxhija is the first graduate of the Master's study program Data Science.
Congratulations and good luck on his further research journey!
