Professor Lucia Moura visited MATRIS Research Group
Professor Lucia Moura from the University of Ottawa, Canada, visited the MATRIS Research Group for two days focusing on research discussion and mutual exchange, from the 29th-30th of June 2023. Prof. Moura is a distinguished researcher in the filed of combinatorial designs – their theory and their applications.
During her visit, Prof. Moura gave two talks on Hypergraph-dependent Covering Arrays and Cover-free Families on Hypergraphs. Cover-free Families are widely studied combinatorial objects finding use in applications in cryptography and communications and combinatorial group testing. In particular, they are an approach to the non-adaptive group testing problem, i.e. the identification of a set of up to d defective items amongst a set of n items by testing them in pre-specified groups. This research area attained increased attention lately, not at last through the COVID-19 Pandemic [1]. In her work, Prof. Moura introduces generalizations of cover-free families, where possible sets of defective items are specified by the edges of a hypergraph, allowing for structure-aware combinatorial group testing.
This notion allows to design group testing schemes taking into account underlying relations among the individuals to be tested, for example to include the information which groups of students are visiting which classes, when the students of a school or university are to be tested.
The members of the MATRIS research group contributed to the mutual exchange by giving several talks, for example a talk on Balanced Covering Arrays, a talk on Optimal Ordered Covering Arrays via an Exact Algorithm, and An Overview of Applications of Combinatorial Testing.
The vital discussions and the exchange of ideas pave the way for, hopefully fruitful, collaborations between the MATRIS Research Group and Prof. Lucia Moura.
