The FWO (Flemish Research Foundation) approved the Scientific Research Project "Network Coding Theory, Cryptography and Finite Geometry" starting from 01.01.2024 for five years.
The list of partners is:

Belgium

• Ghent: Incidence Geometry (Bart De Bruyn, Leo Storme)
• KU Leuven: COSIC (Bart Preneel, Svetla Nikova, Vincent Rijmen, Wouter Castryck)
• VUB: Digital mathematics (Ann Dooms, Jan De Beule)
• ULB: Cryptography Group (Christophe Petit)
• UCLouvain Crypto Group (Olivier Pereira, Francois-Xavier Standaert)

Foreign partners:

• University of Bayreuth: Discrete Mathematics (Alfred Wassermann, Sascha Kurz, Michael Kiermaier)
• Royal Holloway University of London (Simon Blackburn, Keith Martin, Siaw-Lynn Ng)
• Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Peter Boyvalenkov, Assia Rousseva, Ivan landjev)
• Foundations of Computation, University of Sankt-Gallen (Anna-Lena Horlemann-Trautmann)
• Bristol Cryptography Group: (Chloe Martindale)

The working group Discrete Structures at the Universit of Bayreuth will contribute expertise on the construction and classification of various discrete structures like combinatorial designs, q-analogs of designs, linear codes, subspace codes and partial spreads. Especially, the working group has long-standing expertise to use the "Kramer-Mesner method", i.e. prescribe a group of symmetry and search (mostly by computer) for objects possessing these symmetries. The group has an extensive repertoire of computer algorithms to solve the underlying computational problems and has successfully applied this method in many cases, previously. Using these tools, in recent years the group has gained a lot of experience in classifying objects with fixed substructures and succeeded in deriving general, computer-free constructions of infinite series of certain extremal discrete structures from computer results. Moreover, the working group has a good overview of interconnections between the various discrete structures.