The UPC leads a European project to study the behaviour of complex geometric networks

The aim of the European project Combinatorics of Networks and Computation (CONNECT) is to understand complex geometric networks such as those that model the internet and the spread of infections. Coordinated by the UPC, the project connects researchers from 14 universities in Europe and the American continent.

Apr 26, 2018

Networks are present in many areas of our lives. They model social relationships, the internet, links between web pages, the spread of viral infections, and road networks. The objective of the CONNECT project is to better understand the behaviour of networks from a geometrical and computational perspective.

Though they are made up of very simple elements (a set of nodes and a series of connections between them), geometric networks are large and complex. To understand them, the project brings together researchers from computational geometry, discrete mathematics, graphic design and probability.

The project is coordinated by a team of researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)’s Department of Mathematics and is divided into work packages. The theoretical packages include one led by the UPC on restricted orientation geometry, in addition to packages on geometric networks and stochastic geometry. Other packages focus on the application of algorithms to more specific cases.

Drones and flamenco
One of the applied packages of the project is coordinated by the University of Seville. It focuses on optimising routes for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are used, for example, in surveillance missions to prevent forest fires and monitor oil spills. This package will also use music information retrieval tools to extract the intrinsic properties of flamenco music, such as tone, rhythm, timbre, and harmony. The applications include indexing music collections and creating acoustic-based music recommendation systems. The computational analysis of flamenco involves a wide variety of challenging mathematical and algorithmic problems.

Financed by the European Union's H2020 programme and lasting four years, the CONNECT project involves more than 30 researchers from 14 institutions. Eight of these are European: the Graz University of Technology (Austria), the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), the Czech Academy of Sciences (Czech Republic), the Università degli Studi Roma Tre (Italy), and the University of Zaragoza, the University of Alcalá, the University of Seville and the UPC (Spain). A further six are from the American continent: the Carleton University (Canada), the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis de Potosí, the Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas A.C., the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Mexico), and the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (Chile).