This year's Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) Fellowship programme is being held in the UK for the first time. The University of Warwick is hosting the Fellowships this summer in conjunction with the Alan Turing Institute. The 2019 programme is running from June 10 to August 28.

The Fellowship is a project-based training programme to supply data scientists with skills to create data-driven solutions to real-world problems. It trains aspiring data scientists to work on data mining, machine learning, big data and data science projects with social impact.

It was first pioneered by the University of Chicago, and since 2013 has seen more than 200 graduate and undergraduate students studying computer science, social sciences, statistics, public policy and other quantitative fields undertaking a DSSG Fellowship at the University of Chicago.

The Alan Turing Institute’s vision to advance research for public good and train the next generation of leaders is directly aligned with DSSG’s own goal to produce data scientists with strong skills in solving real-world problems.

Fellows work with non-profit and government partners around the world. To date, more than 60 projects have run, which have helped lots of organisations do more with their data, enhancing their services, interventions and outreach so that they can fulfil their mission of improving lives across the world.

Further details on the fellowship can be found here.

We are delighted to report that Dr Hongkai Wen has been promoted to Associate Professor, effective from 1 July 2019. Quoting from his recommendation,

Hongkai’s publication trajectory has been impressive in both quality and quantity. He consistently produces papers at leading international publication venues, at conferences as well as in journals. Remarkably, Hongkai has already forged strong collaborative links not only with a spectrum of colleagues in the department, but also across the Warwick campus, in particular with researchers in WMG. In the past academic year, Hongkai brought cutting-edge material into our popular 3rd-year module on robotics, which will benefit a number of forthcoming cohorts of students.

it remains to say many congratulations!

The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor Dr. Torsten Mütze, who will be associated with the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP).

Before joining Warwick, Torsten held postdoctoral researcher positions at TU Berlin, Georgia Institute of Technology, and ETH Zürich. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zürich in 2011, under the guidance of Angelika Steger.

Talha Qaiser, a PhD student in the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) lab, successfully defended his PhD thesis titled "Topology and Attention in Computational Pathology" on Thu the 13th of June 2019. The thesis was supervised by Prof Nasir Rajpoot and involved collaborations with the University Hospital Coventry & Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust (Prof David Snead, Dr Yee Wah Tsang), Department of Mathematics (Prof David Epstein), Warwick Medical School (Prof Paul Thornalley) and the Universities of Nottingham, Birmingham, Osaka and Hiroshima.

Researchers from the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, joined by colleagues from Newcastle University and the University of York, led the first successful trial of an end-to-end verifiable e-voting system for polling station voting in Gateshead, Newcastle during the local elections on 2 May 2019. This trial was supported by the electoral service officials at the Gateshead council and was approved by the University of Warwick’s research ethics committee.

This is the first trial of a fully electronic voting system with end-to-end (E2E) verifiability for polling station voting in the UK. Being E2E verifiable, the system allows voters to independently verify if their votes are cast-as-intended, recorded-as-cast and tallied-as-recorded while preserving their privacy. By contrast, with paper ballots, voters must trust other people to record and tally their votes correctly, but they cannot verify this by themselves. The trialled e-voting system is the research outcome of an ERC starting grant, led by Professor Feng Hao from the Department of Computer Science. The prototype was developed under the support by Innovate UK and the trial was sponsored by the Royal Society.

On the election day, voters went to the Gateshead civic centre polling station to vote on paper ballots as usual. Upon exit from the polling station, they were invited to try a touch-screen based e-voting system for a mock election involving a set of dummy candidates. Voters were then provided with an anonymous survey form to indicate based on their voting experience, which of the two voting systems did they prefer. Nearly half of the voters at the Gateshead civic center polling station participated in this trial and provided many useful feedbacks. From the survey results, voters generally found the trialed e-voting system easy to use, and preferred it to paper ballots.

From Gateshead Council News, this is "a new system that could completely revolutionise the elections system". The Gateshead trial is also covered in the BBC News, University Press Releases, Webroots democracy, Government Business, Gizmodo, and ChronicalLive. A video demonstration of the trialled e-voting system is available on YouTube.

The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor Dr. Arpan Mukhopadhyay.

Before joining Warwick, Arpan held post-doctoral positions in the Computer Communications and Applications Laboratory-2 (LCA-2) of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and in the DYOGENE project team of INRIA, Paris, France. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 2016.

Arpan is working in the broad area of mathematical modeling, performance analysis, optimization, and control of complex networks. His research spans several application areas, e.g., wireless networks, content distribution networks, cloud networks, social networks, etc. His theoretical works on mean field approximations extend the applicability of this performance analysis method to heterogeneous networks and have received Best Paper Awards at IFIP Performance 2015 and ITC 2015. Arpan won the ITC Rising Scholar Award in 2018.