CCOSA project

CCOSA is a project funded by European Research Council (ERC) as a starting grant. Its principal investigator is Daniel Kráľ who is an associate professor at Charles University and who works on the project together with his young colleagues Zdeněk Dvořák, Vít Jelínek, Ondřej Pangrác, Robert Šámal and their students. The project uses scientific and logistic background provided by IUUK, DIMATIA center and Institute for Theoretical Computer Science (ITI) at Charles University.

The full name of the project is "Classes of Combinatorial Objects - from Structure to Algorithms". The project started on December 1, 2010 and will last until November 30, 2015. In the framework of the project, we offer several types of visiting positions (see details below) and applications are welcomed during the whole period of the project. We also organize a small workshop in the fall 2011 on topics close to the project.

The project has moved to the University of Warwick at the beginning of October 2012.

Goals of the project

The project aims at analyzing fundamental problems from combinatorics using the most current methods available and at providing new structural and algorithmic insights to such problems. The problems considered will be treated on a general level of classes of combinatorial objects of the same kind and the developed general methods will also be applied to specific open problems.

The project has two main areas. The first one is concerned with dense combinatorial objects. Such objects appear in extremal combinatorics and tools developed to handle them found their applications in different areas of mathematics and computer science. The project will focus on extending known methods to new classes of combinatorial objects, in particular those from algebra. We also intend to apply Razborov flag algebras to problems from extremal combinatorics. Applications of the obtained results in property testing will also be considered.

The other area of the project deals with techniques for sparse objects. Examples of sparse objects are graphs embeddable in a fixed surface and more general minor-closed classes of graphs. The project objectives include providing new structural results and algorithmic metatheorems for classes of sparse objects using both classical tools based on the theory of graph minors as well as new tools based on the framework of classes of nowhere-dense structures.

Team members

Faculty: Students:

Postdocs and long-term visitors

  • Demetres Christofides, postdoc, Dec 2010-Jul 2011
  • Luke Postle, student visitor, April 2011-June 2011
  • Katherine Edwards, student visitor, April 2011-June 2011
  • Archontia Giannopoulou, student visitor, October 2011-March 2012
  • Andrew Treglown, postdoc, October 2011-September 2012
  • Jan Mazak, postdoc, October 2011-June 2012
  • Roman Glebov, April-August 2012

Funding info

ERC logo This project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 259385. FP7 logo