We are pleased to report that Dr Matthew Leeke, Reader at the Department of Computer Science, has been recognised as part of the Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence (WATE) 2020-21. WATE seeks to recognise outstanding teaching and support of learning across the University. This year the awards celebrated stories of everyday excellence in challenging times, and worked to plant the seeds for future approaches to teaching and learning.

Dr Matthew Leeke said regarding his award:

I'm hugely grateful to our students for the nomination. I feel fortunate to be recognised but even more fortunate to work with such talented and thoughtful people. I'd also like to thank my colleagues for their support. So much of what we do in academia goes unseen, making it important to remember that any success is always a team effort. The module tutors I worked with this year are a great example. Archie, Kabir and Vasan went well above-and-beyond in exceptionally difficult circumstances. It's the work of postgraduate students like them and our support teams that make any kind of recognition possible.

We're happy to announce that Ninad Rajgopal has joined the department as a Research Fellow. Ninad is currently funded by Tom Gur's UKRI project "Foundations of classical and quantum verifiable computing".

Ninad completed his PhD at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Rahul Santhanam. He is broadly interested in theoretical computer science, complexity theory, pseudo-randomness, and learning algorithms.

We are happy to announce that Dr Arshad Jhumka, Dr Gihan Mudalige and Dr Victor Sanchez have been promoted to Reader, effective from 1 August 2021. Quoting from Victor's recommendation,

Dr Sanchez has brought in significant research funding as PI, and as CoI was key to the successful completion of the large IDENTITY project. The size and quality of Dr Sanchez’s research group is impressive, as well as his leadership in joint supervision with colleagues. ... Dr Sanchez is one of the most effective teachers in the department. Every module he has been responsible for has been successful, including in recent years our flagship Machine Learning popular option for 3rd-year undergraduates. Several times, Dr Sanchez has designed or completely redesigned modules, resulting in evidenced student satisfaction.

from Gihan's recommendation,

The career of Dr Gihan Mudalige in the department has been steadily and rapidly progressing upwards since his appointment as Assistant Professor in 2016, marked by such milestones as obtaining a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and being promoted to Associate Professor in 2018, shortly followed by the award of a £1.8M EPSRC-Rolls Royce grant, and taking up the leadership of the department’s high-performance computing research in 2020. ... Dr Mudalige has contributed considerably to the life of the department through his membership and leadership of the Computer Systems Engineering course committee, as well as having been responsible for internships and intercalated years.

and from the recommendation for Arshad,

The high regard of Dr Jhumka’s work by the international research community is clear from his best paper awards, editorial roles, invited talks, and wide network of collaborators. In the department, Dr Jhumka has been a leader in successfully bridging fundamental and applied research. His expertise has been recognized by a range of industrial and government partners, leading to several grants including the current substantial EPSRC PETRAS project. ... Dr Jhumka has introduced a number of practices into his teaching (such as an approach to coursework assignments by group work) that have been popular with students as well as subsequently adopted by other colleagues.

it remains to say many congratulations!

We are delighted to report that Dr Greg Watson and Dr Lin Gui have been promoted to, respectively, Senior Teaching Fellow and Senior Research Fellow, effective from 1 August 2021. Quoting from their recommendations,

What particularly stands out ... is the virtuous circle of (1) Dr Watson’s continual striving for advancing his teaching expertise, evidenced by the extensive courses he has both attended and contributed to, (2) the strong two-way links between Dr Watson’s development and his teaching practice (and that of his peers), evidenced by the various different changes and improvements that he introduced in the classroom based on his scholarly educational investigations, and (3) the consistent very positive feedback from different groups of students as well as colleagues.

and

Dr Lin Gui is one of the most successful postdoctoral researchers in the recent history of the Department, and is continuing his research career with us after a prestigious two-year Marie Curie fellowship. He has been building a solid and high-flying international reputation, underpinned by an impressive trajectory of high-quality publications. Dr Gui’s initiative and emerging independence are in particular reflected in his contributions to substantial successful funding proposals.

it remains to say many congratulations!

Dr. Tanaya Guha (PI) has been awarded a research grant by Ford Motor Company through their Global University Research Program to develop the project "Multimodal Learning for In-Car Driver's Activity Monitoring". This 2-year project aims at developing an AI system that can monitor driver's and passengers' safety through audiovisual scene analysis integrated with short-term driving patterns. For example, by creating alerts when a driver is distracted. The project will be developed in collaboration with Ford's AI research at Michigan.

Congratulations to third-year Computer Science student Hengrui Zhang, who has had an abstract accepted at the British Conference of Undergraduate Research 2021 (BCUR 2021). Hengrui’s abstract, titled "Emotional Adjusted Chinese Sentiment Analysis", proposes a new and enhanced sentiment analysis model, SETCM, which combines the advantages of sentiment lexicon, emoji and neural computing technology. The proposed method overcomes the shortcomings of existing sentiment analysis on Chinese-language text. It is based on the work that Hengrui has completed as part of his third-year project, supervised by Dr Greg Watson.

Shen Wang and Professor Feng Hao from the Systems and Security theme at the Department of Computer Science and Ehsan Toreini from Durham University, have had the paper ‘Anti-Counterfeiting for Polymer Banknotes Based on Polymer Substrate Fingerprinting’, published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, in which they propose a novel technique called Polymer Substrate Fingerprinting, which can identify each banknote’s own unique, unclonable fingerprint.

The researchers have found that every polymer banknote has a unique "fingerprint", which is caused by the inevitable imperfection in the physical manufacturing process, whereby the opacity coating, a critical step during the production of polymer notes, leaves an uneven coating layer with a random dispersion of impurities in the ink. This imperfection results in random translucent patterns when a polymer banknote is back-lit by a light source.