Scientific track record

Although the team of partners seems large and diverse it has a long common proven scientific track record that is related to the call with many published joint papers as shown by the references used in this section (Section A) as well as references in CVs of PIs and APs. Senior participants have been project leaders in important related national projects and programs and are internationally recognized for their work. Many are authors of scientific monographs related to themes of GReGAS. They also held important positions in their departments and elsewhere with proven leader abilities.

The Slovenian scientists involved in the project represent the projects research core which serves as a hub for research cooperation covering all the basic topics in this project. These scientists have established strong and long term international cooperation through
visits, bilateral projects and joint work which is reflected in a large number of scientific papers published in the scientific journals of the highest reputation in the related fields. Slovenian researchers in the graph theory have a prominent role of an integrator in the field also through:

• The Bled Graph Theory Conference, which is traditionally organized every 4 years. The last 2007 conference was attended by 200 scientists, 15 invited speakers from all over the world with 14 mini symposia in specialized fields. This was one of the top world conferences in graph theory.
• The international scientific journal Ars Mathematica Contemporanea (http://amc.imfm.si), covering graph theory, which has been established by all the major participants of the projects and other prominent scientists. The journal has publishes 2 issues per year and is indexed by Zentralblatt and Mathreviews.

PI Imrich and PI Pisanski have established a long term fruitful cooperation, which was later upgraded by cooperation with Prof. Klavar (then PhD student of both). The cooperation was consolidated through traditional annual Ljubljana-Leoben seminars for more than 20 years (see http://conferences.imfm.si under LL seminar) which a traditional annual meeting of academic community developed around PI Imrich (PI Stadler, PI Leydold and PI Biyikoglu) and Slovenian academic community in graph theory and algorithms. Traditionally the cooperation of Slovenians and Austrians with Croatians was through chemical graph theory, which maintained and fostered through the traditional annual MATH/CHEM/COMP conference in Dubrovnik (http://mcc.irb.hr/). In last 5 years the research communities of maps and abstract polytopes have started to cooperate. In 2007 a special mini symposium was organized at Bled conference. This research group involves scientist AP Prof. Schulte and PI Prof. Leemans. Within this group the cooperation strengthened by exchange of post-docs and PhD students on relations Slovenia-Canada, Slovenia-Mexico and Belgium-Mexico. Although strong, the cooperation was never before formalized through a joint project with formal common goal. This project will therefore represent a next step.