CTIC was a Sino-Danish research center that started operations on April 1st, 2011. The center was a three-year collaboration between the Computer Science Department at Aarhus University, Denmark and ITCS, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Center leaders were Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, Tsinghua, and Peter Bro Miltersen, Aarhus. CTIC was funded by the Danish Research Foundation and by the Mational Science Foundation of China (NFSC).

The focus areas of the center were computational complexity theory, cryptography, quantum information theory, and algorithmic game theory.

• Computational Complexity Theory, the study of computational resources needed to do computation, providing the necessary foundation for understanding feasibility or infeasibility of computational tasks.

• Cryptography, the study of how interactive computation can be made secure, a crucially important ingredient in an internet-based society.

• Quantum Informatics, the study of how information processing works when the behavior of communication and computing equipment is governed by quantum mechanics, a study that becomes necessary, as our electronic equipment grows too small for classical physics to apply.

• Algorithmic Game Theory, the study of how multi-agent systems behave when agents have conflicting interests, a necessary perspective towards understanding interaction on networks spanning diverse sectors and countries across the globe.

The four areas represented different perspectives on our main subject, and each of them offered a necessary contribution to the scientific challenge of interactive computing. On the other hand, they were, in fact, intimately related, and very exciting research opportunities were just now emerging in the border areas between them.

Center Leaders

Professor Andrew Chi-Chih Yao:

Professor Yao was born in Shanghai, China. He received a BS in Physics from National Taiwan University , a PhD in Physics from Harvard University, and a PhD in Computer Science from University of Illinois. His research interests include analysis of algorithms, computational complexity, cryptography and quantum computing. From 1975 onward, Professor Yao served on the faculty at MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and during 1986 - 2004, as William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. In 2004, he left Princeton to become a Professor of Computer Science at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is also a Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Professor Yao was recipient of the prestigious A.M. Turing Award in year 2000 for his contributions to the theory of computation, including communication complexity, pseudorandom number generation, and quantum computation. He has received numerous other honors and awards, including the George Polya Prize, the Donald E. Knuth Prize, and several honorary degrees. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  

Professor Peter Bro Miltersen:

Peter Bro Miltersen received his PhD from Aarhus University in 1993. He is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science at University of Aarhus. The research of Professor Miltersen currently focuses on computational complexity theory and computational game theory. He has published more than fifty papers within the theory of computation and is best known for his contributions to the theory of cell probe complexity, the theory of pseudorandom generators and the computational theory of stochastic games. Professor Miltersen has served in the program committees of more than thirty international conferences and workshops. He is associate editor of ACM Transactions of Computation Theory and is currently serving as steering committee chair of the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity.

Center Managers: Mengting Song from Tsinghua University and Dorthe Haagen Nielsen from Aarhus University.