Dr Mike Joy has been awarded 'Best Personal Tutor' in the STARS of Warwick awards. The student-led teaching awards recognise and celebrate staff members who have gone the extra mile for the benefit of students.

The Awards were launched in 2012 and are run by students, nominated by students and judged by students. From choosing categories to nominating and presenting awards, STARS is a completely student-led scheme giving students the chance to reward staff they feel have gone above and beyond for the sake of their students.

Full list of winners.

Rob will join the Department as a Professor associated with the Centre for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).

Rob is a computer scientist with a strong inter-disciplinary background, focusing on social informatics. In general terms, his research aims are to understand how cognitive, organisational and social factors shape processes of appropriation (design, development and adoption) of innovations in information and communication technologies (ICTs). Rob's particular interests are in: computer-supported, collaborative work; dependability of ICTs; social media and health informatics. Currently active areas of research include research infrastructures, tools and methods, studies of innovation in the NHS and methodologies for the co-development of assistive living technologies.

At Manchester University, Rob was Director of the Manchester eResearch Centre, a multi-disciplinary group working on innovative research infrastructures, tools and methods. He also leads the Analysing Social Media Collaboration (ASMC) a multidisciplinary group of researchers based at several UK universities. ASMC focuses on analysing data from social media platforms such as Twitter with the aim of understanding the role they play in social phenomena. ASMC conducted the analysis tweets sent during the August 2011 riots for the Guardian/LSE ‘Reading the Riots’ project. The group is now developing a Twitter analysis workbench.

Rob has been Principal or Co-Investigator on over 50 projects. He has published over 180 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference, is co-editor with Peter Halfpenny of ‘Innovations in Digital Research Methods’ to be published by Sage in 2013 and has been editor of the Health Informatics Journal since 2004.

For more information about Rob’s research please see his web page at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/Rob_Procter

Andrzej Murawski joined the Department in January 2013 as an Associate Professor. His doctoral degree is from the University of Oxford, where he was also a Junior Research Fellow (St John's College) and subsequently an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow. Before coming to Warwick he held a Lectureship at the University of Leicester.

Andrzej's research concerns the semantics of programming languages and its applications to program verification. In particular, he has extensive expertise in modelling logical systems and programming languages using games, an area known as game semantics.

Andrzej has served on program committees of international conferences such as FOSSACS, ICALP, LICS and POPL. He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College and Publicity Chair of LICS. His research has been supported by EPSRC, LMS and the Royal Society.

Andrzej teaches CS245 Automata and Formal Languages and CS246 Further Automata and Formal Languages in Term II.

For more information about Andrzej’s research please see his web page at http://warwick.ac.uk/amurawski/.

Two alumni form Warwick -James Gough (MEng) and Richard Warburton (MEng, PhD) were part of the London Java Community (LJC) team at the prestigious JavaOne 2012 Conference in San Fransisco. The LJC won two awards, the JCP Award and the Duke's Choice award. Both were given in recognition of the work of LJC on two projects: Adopt-a-JSR and Adopt-OpenJDK. Both projects are concerned with increasing the input of User Communities in the development of the Java language, and the prizes are a recognition of the increasing role of well-organized communities such as LJC in driving forward developments in the language.

James's blog entry provides more information on the event. Both James and Richard have taken advantage of their experience as students at Warwick and are actively involved in building a software develoment community in London. Congratulations to the LJC team!

Two researchers have joined the University of Warwick to tackle the challenges faced by cities in the 21^st century as part of the New York-based Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).

The University of Warwick is a member of a consortium, led by New York University, which is building a new applied science research institute in New York in response to a call issued by the city’s mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The University has now welcomed the first of a number of new academic staff to be appointed to work at CUSP, Dr Maria Liakata and Dr Weisi Guo.

More information is available in the press release

Anna Adamaszek successfully completed her PhD with the Thesis entitled "Approximation Algorithms for Geometric, Caching and Scheduling Problems", under the supervision of Prof Artur Czumaj.

Anna's PhD focuses on the study of approximation algorithms for optimization problems, one of the core areas of modern theoretical computer science. She has obtained research results in two areas: geometric optimisation algorithms and online algorithms. In the first topic, she presented new approximation algorithms for the capacitated location routing problem and the capacitated network design problem in the Euclidean plane. For online algorithms, she made a major progress in the study of two well known caching and scheduling problems: the generalized caching problem and the reordering buffer management problem. Her research has been presented in several most prestigious conferences in the field, including STOC'2011, ICALP'2011, and SODA'2012.

After completing PhD in Warwick, Ania moved to Germany, where she has been awarded a prestigious Lise-Meitner-Award postdoctoral fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik in Saarbrücken.

We are pleased to welcome Dr Victor Sanchez to the department who will be joining us as an Assistant Professor in October 2012.

Victor obtained his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2010 from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He then joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley as a post-doctoral fellow, where he worked in the Video and Image Processing Laboratory.

Victor has been the recipient of research awards from the main federal funding agencies in Canada, CIHR and NSERC, and Mexico, CoNACYT. Victor's primary research interest lies in the areas of signal processing and discrete-event simulation with applications healthcare. He has published several papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences in the areas of medical imaging, telemedicine and computer simulation in healthcare. Victor recently co-authored a book on computer simulation for healthcare evaluation.

Victor will be teaching the new module CS345 Sensor Networks and Mobile Data Communications.

For more information about Victor's research please visit his homepage at UC Berkeley.