Igor Potapov, a Professor in the University’s Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a prestigious Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship for 2020/21.
Professor Igor Potapov is an internationally recognised research leader in the field of reachability problems, an area of theoretical computer science. He also heads up the Algorithms, Complexity Theory and Optimisation (ACTO) research group and is a council member of the Networks Sciences and Technologies (NeST) initiative at the University.
The Fellowship, one of just seven awarded by Royal Society in UK, will allow Professor Potapov to devote himself to the study of reachability questions, that appear in analysis of computational devices, mathematical abstractions and evolving natural processes. Informally speaking these questions are about recognizing which states, from a (potentially infinite) set of possibilities, can be reached and which cannot be reached.
The specific focus will be building efficient algorithmic techniques for the next-generation reachability problems by developing new concepts and methods combining symbolic and numerical techniques, exploring challenging aspects of computer related mathematics on Matrices, Graphs and Automata and unifying the results of these three fundamental theories.
Commenting on his Fellowship, Professor Potapov said: “I am delighted to have received this Fellowship which will allow me to build up and extend research techniques for reachability problems on matrix and automata systems. I look forward to working with international collaborators to make progress on several fundamental long-standing reachability problems on the edge of Mathematics and Computer Science.”
The Royal Society Fellowship scheme, which covers all areas of the life and physical sciences, including engineering, but excluding clinical medicine, provides experienced academic researchers with the opportunity to focus on full-time research for up to one year, by relieving them of all their teaching and administrative duties during that period.