The European Research Council (ERC) has announced this year’s Starting Grant winners. Our researcher, João Ribeiro, is among them, and we will host his project, LESYNCH, which explores the limits and efficiency of coding against synchronization errors.

"Imagine that Alice wants to send a message to Bob, but they are connected only through a noisy communication channel that introduces errors. To help Bob recover the message, Alice must encode it by adding redundancy. How much redundancy is necessary? And can we design efficient encoding and error-correction algorithms that approach the theoretical minimum?", explains João Ribeiro. 

While some types of errors, like erasures, are well understood, deletions present far greater difficulties:

"Erasures are simple; some symbols are replaced by a ‘?’, and decades of research have created a rich mathematical theory with many applications. Deletions, however, are more challenging: erased symbols are simply removed, causing a loss of synchronization. Most techniques developed for erasures fail in this setting."

LESYNCH project addresses one of the fundamental challenges in coding and information theory: designing efficient methods to transmit information over noisy channels. It will deepen understanding of synchronization errors and seek solutions that have both theoretical significance and practical applications, such as emerging data storage technologies, including DNA-based storage. João notes:

"I find this research fascinating because it involves problems that are easy to state yet reveal fundamental limitations of current techniques. These errors are not only mathematically intriguing but also appear in practical contexts."

Regarding the impact of the ERC funding, João says:

"This grant allows me to build a large and vibrant research group focused on coding and information theory. It gives me the freedom to pursue the problems I find most exciting over the next five years and enables closer collaboration with international research groups, something extremely challenging without this kind of support, given the limited funding for basic science in Portugal."

This year, ERC awarded ten Starting Grants to Portuguese researchers in different areas. Six of these researchers will conduct their projects at host institutions in Portugal, across four domains. Among the six researchers, João Ribeiro was the only grantee working in the domain of Systems and Communication Engineering (PE7).

This is the third ERC Grant hosted by Instituto de Telecomunicações. André Martins received, respectively, in 2017 and 2023, a Starting Grant (link) and a Consolidator Grant (link), both for supporting his research in Natural Language Processing (NLP). André Martins is now one of the researchers involved in the project AMALIA (the so-called Portuguese ChatGPT).

Photo: IST

Announcement on ERC: