2+1 ERC Grants for ISTA

Two ERC Proof of Concept Grants and one ERC Consolidator Grant. ISTA computer scientist Dan Alistarh receives ERC Proof of Concept Grant. Nadine Poncioni/ISTA - Using comfortably flickering light against mental health issues, making the training of machine learning models easier and more affordable, and investigating mechanisms and biological functions of germ cells in plants relevant for crop breeding - these are the three research projects for which researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have recently been awarded two Proof of Concept Grants and one Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). Proof of Concept Grants target research group leaders who have previously received an ERC grant and now want to use up to 1.5 years of time to explore the commercial or societal potential of their work. This is what ISTA professors Sandra Siegert and Dan Alistarh are now doing with their grants worth 150,000 Euros each. Dan Alistarh - Faster machine learning Machine learning (ML), a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI), has made tremendous progress over the past decade. Basically, it is a method to make a computer learn from data sets to then generalize and perform certain tasks - without having to manually program algorithms for these tasks.