Peter Bühlmann and Rahul Pandharipande: ERC Advanced Grants
We are delighted to announce that Peter Bühlmann and Rahul Pandharipande are two out of ten ETH Zurich researchers that have receive a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). Their projects are funded with around 2 to 3 million Euro each.
Peter Bühlmann is a professor of Mathematics. His focuses are statistics, machine learning and bioinformatics. With the ERC Advanced Grant, he will develop efficient and robust prediction methods for use in questions and scenarios in biology and economics. This entails working on cause-effect relationships in complex volumes of data. The key idea is based on the insight that such relationships (causalities) do not change even if the experimental conditions change or various disturbing influences (perturbations) occur. The ETH researchers are reversing this idea: their algorithms search for stable, unchanging relationships in huge heterogeneous volumes of data. They then use these to infer causalities.
Rahul Pandharipande is a professor of mathematics who researches algebraic geometry, focusing in particular on a type of geometric space known as the moduli spaces of curves. The interactions established at the turn of the 20th century between algebraic geometry, quantum field theory and string theory have proven fertile ground – particularly the connections between the algebraic geometry of moduli spaces and path integrals in quantum field theory. Using these integrals, quantum mechanics records every possible path a particle will take when moving from A to B. Supported by a second ERC Advanced Grant, Pandharipande is looking to gain further insight into moduli spaces, and to help solve integrals that are relevant to string theory.