News

The Faculty of SEM has launched its annual Thesis and Post Doc prizes in January 2026 for the best thesis and research output of 2025 affiliated to the University of Warwick.

In a recent work, visiting undergraduate student Yahel Manor and Warwick DCS researchers Jinqiao Hu and Igor Oliveira addressed a fundamental question relevant to the security of cryptographic protocols.

The symmetry of information principle says that the amount of information that a sequence x of bits reveals about another sequence y is essentially the same in either direction. This is known to hold in an idealised world where computations can take an arbitrarily long time, as demonstrated by A. Kolmogorov and L. Levin in the 1970s. In contrast, modern cryptography is built around deliberate asymmetry—for example, functions of the form y = f(x) that are easy to compute but hard to invert (one-way functions).

The new work shows that, once one moves from the idealised setting of time-unbounded computations to the more realistic world of efficient, randomised computations (algorithms that must run quickly and may use randomness), this symmetry can fail in a strong and unconditional way. In other words, computational constraints can yield information asymmetry. In practical terms, this supports the intuition that information may not be extracted efficiently: knowing y = f(x) may not make x efficiently recoverable to the extent that an (ineffective) symmetry principle would suggest, even when x and y are closely related.

Earlier work formally tied an average-case form of this symmetry failure to the existence of one-way functions, the central primitive in cryptography. By proving new failures of symmetry of information, the authors provide concrete progress towards the computational asymmetry that underpins encryption, digital signatures, and many other cryptographic protocols.

This work will be presented at the 58th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) in June 2026 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.

Failure of Symmetry of Information for Randomised Computations
Jinqiao Hu (University of Warwick); Yahel Manor (University of Haifa); Igor C. Oliveira (University of Warwick)

The paper describing this research is available here.

Professor Andreas Kyprianou has been named among the founding fellows of the newly established Academy for the Mathematical Sciences (AcadMathSci) — a new national academy created to bring together the UK’s strongest mathematical scientists across academia, education, business, industry, and government to help solve some of the UK’s biggest challenges.

We are pleased to share that the Department of Physics will be hosting a 2026 Sutton Trust Physics and Astronomy Summer School, led by Dr Lauren Doyle.

The Department of Chemistry is seeking colleagues who will establish a vigorous research program that is closely aligned to our priority research themes: Sustainability, Energy and the Environment, Health and Data and Modelling.

Plants mobilise their immune defences far earlier than scientists have believed for decades—and through a previously overlooked early signalling mechanism—according to a new study published in Nature Plants.

Professor Murray Grant and his team, including Emily Breeze and Erin Stroud have discovered a rapid, jasmonate-driven, early immune response in plants. A breakthrough live-imaging tool has allowed them to visualise immune signals moving out of infected leaves and across into uninfected leaves in real time.

(Image shows Temporal spatial dynamics of luciferase activity in JISS1:LUC plants following DCavrRpm1 challenge, initiating at 3 hpi. 3.20 hpi, 3.50 hpi and 4.30 hpi images capture the systemic spread of the signal over time. Credit: Gaikwad, T., Breen, S., Breeze, E., Stroud, E. et al. Nature Plants (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-025-02178-4)

In celebration of International Day of Women and Girls in Science (Wednesday 11 February 2026), the Outreach and Widening Participation team at WMG hosted a special event at Coventry Transport Museum to encourage young women to pursue science. Over 180 female students from local primary and secondary schools came together to discover and celebrate the achievements of women, past and present, who have helped forge a path for today’s scientists, engineers, and technicians.

Huge congratulations to Dr Bryn Davies, who has received a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award, “Unlocking a New Generation of Imperfection-Resilient Metamaterials.”

Previous winners of this in the department include Peter Topping, Martin Hairer, and Tom Montenegro-Johnson.

A focused scientific meeting on cytoskeletal filaments and molecular motors - the cellular machinery that drives cell division, cell migration and the motility and correct distribution of organelles. The programme will include inspiring keynotes from Joe Howard and Kristen Verhey, and provide many speaking opportunities for postdocs and students. Further, we will celebrate the career of Rob Cross and his contributions to kinesin and tubulin biophysics as he transitions into life as Emeritus Professor. The event will also be available via Livestream.

Two pieces of evidence they submitted were recently published in support of this: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/148542/pdf/Link opens in a new window and https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/154425/pdf/Link opens in a new window"