Two papers by researchers at the Department of Computer Science have been accepted to the 36th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing ICS 2022 to be held on the 28-30th of June this year. ICS is one of the most prominent and revered conferences in High Performance Computing, highly regarded by the HPC community for publishing leading-edge research in this area. The two papers accepted are:

1. High Throughput Multidimensional Tridiagonal System Solvers on FPGAs (Preprint) by Kamalavasan Kamalakkannan and Gihan Mudalige at Warwick, together with Istvan Reguly (PPCU) and Suhaib Fahmy (KAUST).
2. Clairvoyant: A Log-Based Transformer-Decoder for Failure Prediction in Large-Scale Systems by Khalid Alharthi and Arshad Jhumka at Warwick, together with Sheng Di, Franck Cappello at Argonne National Laboratory. Preprint. The ACM ICS2022 full program can be found here.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the UK’s system for assessing the quality of research in the country's higher education institutions.

The results of the 2021 REF rank Warwick Computer Science 4th out of 90 UK computing departments. This cements our position as one of the top Computer Science departments in the UK, a position we have held for some time under different assessment methodologies.

Research Excellence at Warwick

Professor Edmund T Rolls' book, Brain Computations: What and How, has now been reviewed in Brain, where it has been described as "the first complete attempt to summarize our current knowledge about computation in the brain". The book considers what is computed in each brain system; and how it is computed. The reviewer considers that this book may provide a grand unifying theory, with biologically plausible models of brain computations. The book review, and information about Brain Computations: What and How (Rolls 2021) Oxford University Press are available here.

Gunduz Vehbi Demirci has been awarded with the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine Post-Doctoral Research Prize 2022 for his paper jointly with Prof. Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu, "Partitioning sparse deep neural networks for scalable training and inference", published in the Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS '21) (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3447818.3460372).

Training large-scale deep learning models is notoriously difficult. Gunduz develops a highly parallel solution to scale training of sparse deep learning models, which is combined with a novel combinatorial optimisation built on a hypergraph partitioning model, reducing parallelisation overheads and achieving computational balance among processors. An end-to-end software solution is released, enabling competing with big tech companies that have access to large infrastructures and datasets.

The work is summarised in a paper accepted by the 2021 ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, which is a premier conference in high-end systems. The research output will have a great potential to bring significant practical impact in long term as developing such comprehensive solutions takes time and is typically achieved only within large groups.

Colleagues, friends, family and former students of Professor Roland Wilson gathered last Friday to celebrate his life and to inaugurate a bench in his memory. The bench is located outside the Department, surrounded by daisies at this time of year, overlooking the lake and the fountains.

Roland's son and daughter toured the Department and visited one of the research groups which is building on Roland’s intellectual legacy under the leadership of his former PhD student Nasir Rajpoot (now a Professor in the Department). Dr Abhir Bhalerao, also a former student and close colleague of Roland, said a few words about Roland's contribution to our community and his lasting importance to us. Head of Department Professor Yulia Timofeeva cut a ribbon on the bench before we all returned to the common room to share memories and anecdotes.

Although an emotional occasion for many of us, it was very nice to be able to gather together again after the restrictions of the last two years and to remember Roland and his legacy.

We are happy to announce that Dr Dmitry Chistikov has been promoted to Associate Professor from 1 April 2022. Since joining Warwick in 2017, Dmitry has made a significant contribution to the department with his research, teaching, and administrative and supportive roles. Many congratulations to Dmitry for all his achievements!

Congratulations to Harita Dellaporta for receiving the Best Paper Award at the premier conference in Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2022 for her paper on Robust Bayesian Inference for Simulator-based Models via the MMD Posterior Bootstrap.