The field in which Bansal is doing his research is, as he himself says, a hot topic. Bansal, who joined TU/e in 2011, plans to use the grant to develop new algorithmic techniques for making discrete decisions in a continuous manner. He expects this work to have applications in logistics, bioinformatics, chip design, and machine learning.

Three months ago Bansal informed the Departmental Board that he would be moving to Amsterdam, where the CWI resides. That was a good while before he knew that NWO would award him the Vici grant. As the Vici is a personal grant, Bansal will be taking the 1.5 million euros with him to his new employer. This grant funding will enable him to take on two PhD candidates and three postdocs. The PhD candidates will however receive their degrees from TU/e since CWI is not authorized to award degrees.

His field of research is not easy to explain to an outsider. The problem of the commercial traveler provides the best illustration. The aim is to visit a whole series of cities, but first you have to work out the optimum travel plan. Bansal: “The possibilities are endless, you can never calculate them all, so it will never be 100 percent optimal. Somewhere in the calculation of the most optimal solution you run into a barrier, so you have to develop algorithms that bring you to that point, and hopefully past it. This isn't yet possible, and trying to achieve it reveals huge gaps in our knowledge, even when the question being tackled is as basic as it gets.”

Bansal, who received an ERC grant back in 2013, will continue working at TU/e for 90 percent of his time until June of this year. Here, he is currently still supervising three PhD candidates and two postdocs. Starting in June he will divide his time equally between CWI and TU/e. As of June 2019 he will still spend 20 percent of his time working at TU/e.

Photo | Vincent van den Hoogen