Computer Science News

We are delighted to announce that a result coauthored by Sayan Bhattacharya and Martin Costa (from our Theory and Foundations Research Division), along with Sepehr Assadi (University of Waterloo), Soheil Behnezhad (Northeastern University), Shay Solomon (Tel Aviv University) and Tianyi Zhang (ETH Zurich), has received a best paper award at the upcoming ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), 2025. STOC is a flagship international conference in theoretical computer science.

The paper, titled "Vizing's Theorem in Near-Linear Time," tackles a fundamental, textbook edge-coloring problem: Given a graph G with n vertices and m edges, the goal is to assign a color to each edge such that no two edges sharing a common endpoint receive the same color. A classical result by Vizing, dating back to 1960s, proves that any simple graph can always be edge-colored with at most Δ + 1 colors, where Δ is the maximum degree of a vertex. Vizing's original proof is inherently algorithmic and immediately gives an O(mn) time algorithm for computing such a coloring.

This problem has seen a long and influential line of research aimed at designing faster algorithms for this basic task. For over four decades, the best-known runtime was Õ(m√n), a significant barrier that was only broken in 2024 through concurrent, independent works. The recent paper culminates this effort by providing a randomized algorithm that computes a Δ + 1 edge coloring in O(m log Δ) time, a running time that is near-linear in the input size.

We are very happy to announce four recent promotions in the department effective from 1 August 2025:

• Dr Jonathan FossLink opens in a new window has been promoted to Assistant Professor
• Dr Ayse Saliha SunarLink opens in a new window has been promoted to Assistant Professor
• Dr Adam ShephardLink opens in a new window has been promoted to Assistant Professor
• Dr Greg WatsonLink opens in a new window has been promoted to Associate Professor

Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!

Congratulations to Peter Kiss who has been awarded the Best PhD Thesis Prize in Computer Science 2025.

"Keep up your outstanding performance and best wishes for your career!" - Florin

We are excited to share that our team “TIAKong” secured leading positions in the recent PUMALink opens in a new window (Panoptic segmentation of nuclei and tissue in advanced Melanoma) Challenge, organized by the Department of Medical Oncology, University Medical Center Utrecht, in the Netherlands. With over 300 participants from around the globe, this challenge aimed to advance automated panoptic segmentation techniques for H&E-stained melanoma tissue images.

Led by our PhD students Jiaqi Lv and YiJie Zhu, and supported by Brinder Singh Chohan, Shan E Ahmed Raza, with an external collaborator Carmen Guadalupe Colin Tenorio from the Medical University of Vienna. TIAKong achieved first place in Track 1 and second place in Track 2. This outstanding performance underscores the team’s dedication to pushing the boundaries of medical imaging and improving our understanding of advanced melanoma.

We look forward to building on these results and sharing further developments of our panoptic segmentation model in the near future.

We are excited to announce that our team “TIAKong” secured leading positions in the recent Monkey Grand ChallengeLink opens in a new window, organized by the Department of Pathology, Radboudumc, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Drawing more than 400 participants from around the globe, the challenge focused on automated detection and classification of mononuclear leukocytes in PAS-stained transplant kidney biopsy images.

Led by our PhD student Jiaqi Lv, and supported by Esha Nasir, Kesi Xu, Mostafa Jahanifar, Brinder Singh Chohan, Behnaz Elhaminia, and Shan E Ahmed Raza, TIAKong’s cell detection and classification model finished first place in the overall detection track and second place in the detection classification track.

The team is currently evaluating the model for publishing and sharing the code through open-source platforms. We look forward to sharing more updates in the near future.

A study led by University of Warwick Professor Jianfeng Feng has found that regularly sleeping too little is associated with depression and brain loss in emotion areas, while sleeping too long is associated with cognitive decline and degenerative diseases.

Sleeping the right amount is crucial for long term health. 7 hours has recently been proposed as the average amount of sleep to aim for as an adult, yet some people regularly get too little, while others get more than they need.

We are saddened to learn of the passing of Professor Graham R. Nudd. Graham joined the department in 1984 and served as departmental chair for two decades. A few words have been shared by former colleagues to celebrate his life and career.