ERC Starting Grants are very prestigious and are designed to support excellent researchers who are at the beginning of establishing their own independent research group. Only three researches from BGU were awarded this prestigious grant this year.
Prof. Raz Jelinek, BGU's VP and Dean of R&D, "The ERC grants awarded to three young faculty members from the Faculties of Natural Sciences and Health Sciences reflect our striving for scientific excellence and the emphasis BGU places on recruiting high quality, leading faculty members."
Dr. Klim Efremenko won the ERC grant for his project "Interactive coding for interactive communication and the power of adaptivity".
His main field of interest is Error-Correcting Codes (ECC) - one of the main enablers of the digital revolution. Essentially any modern telecommunications, computing, or data storage system relies on error correcting codes. Beyond their immeasurable practical impact, their mathematical development has also led to profound and deep connections between many fields of mathematics, computer science, engineering, and beyond.
The focus of Klim's research is on finding methods for transmitting messages over noisy channels, so that despite the noise, the second party will receive the message intact. The research specifically focuses on developing improved codes for interactive communication, moving away from current coding schemes used for this matter, which were optimized decades ago for one-way transmission of single messages.
In the simplest interactive communication setting, two parties, Alice and Bob, are communicating over a noisy channel C. The meta-question here, analogous to the classical coding question, is: What is the "best" way to use C to simulate communication over a noiseless channel?
Klim's research asks this question not only for two parties, but also for complex multiparty settings communicating over different channels.
