In 2019, Dr Luce le Gorrec was awarded a UK Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Awardees receive project funding for two years and mentoring from an Academy Fellow as well as an advisor from the intelligence community.
Dr Luce le Gorrec is working as a UK Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, at the University of Strathclyde, where she is progressing her project Scalable partitioning of large complex networks.
The creation of complex networks enables researchers to understand elaborate and intricate real-world systems. It is a powerful tool that can represent any kind of interacting data ranging from signals passing between neurons to the mapping of social relationships.
To analyse complex networks, especially large ones, a key point is to break down these systems into manageable and meaningful clusters. Dr le Gorrec is looking to develop algorithms based on network patterns that partition networks into meaningful ‘chunks’. These chunks can then be used to identify neurons involved in the same neuronal function for example, or to find terrorist cells within online social networks.
Dr le Gorrec’s aim is to create software that satisfies three key objectives: that it is versatile, so that it can address networks from a wide variety of applications; that it is scalable, so that it can handle networks containing millions of data; and that it is user-friendly, so that researchers and practitioners can find it straightforward to use.
Dr le Gorrec feels that by developing software that enables users to partition their real-world complex networks, users will be able to gain significant insights into their lines of research. She says “This has the potential to result in a wide range of breakthroughs in several fields, from social network analysis to ecological system studies. In the future I would like to focus on ecological applications, specifically climate change.”
About the scheme
The Government Office for Science offers this Fellowship to outstanding early career science or engineering researchers. Find out more about the UKIC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship programme here.
