Research themes

The MAIA project has two major goals.
One main goal is methodological and aims at adding to the growing insights on how well, and especially on how accurately hard problems can be solved theoretically by exploring different approaches – exact, approximate, randomised, heuristic – and combinations thereof. A second goal relates to the area of application of the algorithms we wish to explore and develop. This area is biology, with as principal motivation better understanding the extent and the role of interspecific interactions in life processes. Such role is indeed increasingly more believed to be crucial in all aspects related with evolution and ecology, health and sickness, and with the environment more in general.
The two goals are intrinsically linked in the sense that only problems related to our biological concern will interest us, and that the need to be as accurate as possible in the answer provided by an algorithm is crucial for interpreting it in terms of biology. The latter is therefore the motivation for the first goal, and inversely. In terms of methodologies, it is important however to observe that any insight into how different approaches may help solve hard problems are expected to be generalisable to many other areas of applications.