Computer Science News

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.

We are pleased to report that members of the department's Theory and Foundations research theme have had four papers accepted to the 54th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2022), the ACM flagship conference in theoretical computer science. The papers are:

• "Deterministic Massively Parallel Connectivity" by Sam Coy and Artur Czumaj.
• "Improved Approximation Guarantees for Shortest Superstrings using Cycle Classification by Overlap to Length Ratios", by Matthias Englert, Nicolaos Matsakis, and Pavel Veselý.
• "Hypercontractivity on High Dimensional Expanders" by Tom Gur, Noam Lifshitz, and Siqi Liu.
• "Worst-Case to Average-Case Reductions via Additive Combinatorics" by Vahid R. Asadi, Alexander Golovnev, Tom Gur, and Igor Shinkar.

We are delighted to announce that Peter Kiss, a PhD student in the Theory and Foundations Research Division, has won the Best Student Paper Award at the Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) 2022 conference for his single-author paper on "Deterministic Dynamic Matching in Worst-Case Update Time". Computing a maximum matching in a graph is one of the most fundamental problems in design and analysis of algorithms. The paper makes important progress on this problem in a setting where the input graph is changing over time via a sequence updates, and one wishes to maintain a large matching efficiently in such a dynamic graph. Along the way, the paper develops a general purpose technique for converting any dynamic algorithm with amortised update time into one with worst-case update time, provided the initial algorithm is able to handle a more general form of batch updates.

Members of the High-Performance and Scientific Computing Group (HPSC) at the department of Computer Science has won a best paper award at the 28th IEEE International Conference on High-Performance Computing, Data and Analytics held on the 17th-18th of December. The winning paper titled Predictive Analysis of Large-Scale Coupled CFD Simulations with the CPX Mini-App, develops a novel representative (mini-)application, specifically designed to model coupled execution of multi-physics numerical simulation codes from the CFD domain. The mini-coupler, CPX, is the first of its kind, combining multiple CFD mini-app instances to predict the run-time and scaling behaviour of large scale coupled CFD simulations, on modern multi-core and many-core clusters such as used for production turbomachinery design at Rolls-Royce plc. The work was carried out by PhD candidate, Archie Powell, in collaboration with Kabir Choudry, Arun Prabhakar, and Gihan Mudalige at the Department of CS Warwick, Dario Amirante (University of Surrey), Istvan Reguly (PPCU) and Stephen Jarvis (University of Birmingham).

The work was funded by the EPSRC Prosperity Partnership in Computational Science for Advanced Simulation and Modelling of Engineering Systems (AsiMoV) and Rolls-Royce plc.