Computer Science News

We are very happy to report that Dr Andrew Hague has been promoted to Senior Teaching Fellow, effective from 1 July 2020. Quoting from his recommendation,

Dr Hague... has built on his successful experiences of design and delivery of teaching in Warwick Foundation Studies, already demonstrating a high standard in module development as well as delivery of lectures, seminars and laboratories in Computer Science. Both feedback from students and references from colleagues testify to his excellence and initiative. … Dr Hague is recognised within a valuable network of contacts on campus, in the computer games industry, and other educational and community organisations, where he is known for his capacity for impactful innovation in the wide domain of educational technology. Dr Hague has also already proved himself in several successful outreach initiatives and events.

it remains to say many congratulations!

Dr Arshad Jhumka from the department’s Artificial Intelligence research theme has been awarded a grant as PI, under the PETRAS SRF programme, to develop and deploy a trusted edge-based Internet of Things (IoT) network. IoT networks are expected to be deployed as solutions to problems in a wide variety of contexts, from non-critical applications such as smart city monitoring to providing support to emergency services such as critical communications. As IoT devices are resource constrained, execution of resource-hungry applications will be offloaded to edge networks for quick response. Such an infrastructure is open to cyber-attacks and needs to be resilient to attack.

We are very happy to report that the Department has won a Bronze Award from the Athena SWAN Charter. This is a key Equality Charter of Advance HE, and it recognises advancement of gender equality: representation, progression and success for all. Commenting on the award, the University's Provost, Professor Christine Ennew, said:

This is excellent news for Computer Science and the wider Warwick community. I would like to offer my congratulations to everyone in the Department for the significant progress that has been made on gender equality in recent years, and I wish them every success in implementing their Action Plan for this area in the coming years.

We are especially grateful to the Self-Assessment Team, and all students and staff who contributed to the questionnaire, the analysis and the consultation. This Bronze Award will be held by the Department until at least November 2023.

Florin Ciucu has been successful with a 491K EPSRC grant application ‘Practical Analysis of Parallel and Networked Queueing Systems’. The project will run for 4 years and will address some fundamental queueing problems at the core of modern computing and communication systems with parallel or network structures. The technical objective is to develop novel martingale-based models and techniques circumventing the historical Poisson assumption on the systems’ input, which has been convincingly shown to be highly misleading for practical purposes. The proposal was supported by IBM Research, Microsoft Research, and VMware.

Dr Criseida Zamora has joined the department to work together with Dr Yulia Timofeeva, Prof Kirill Volynski (UCL) and a number of other world-leading experimental laboratories on an MRC-funded project "Virtual presynaptic nerve terminal". This project aims to develop a unified computational modelling framework which will allow the neuroscience community to explore mechanisms of synaptic transmitter release that cannot be directly determined experimentally.

Criseida is a Bionic engineer working in the Systems Biology field. She received a PhD degree in Biomedical Engineering and Physics working on the analysis of biochemical noise in synthetic genetic circuits at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico. Her academic background and research experience have focused hitherto on building in silico models to study emergent properties of molecular systems to answer physiological questions. She has also worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan and the University of Bristol.

Dr Victor Sanchez (PI) from the department's Artificial Intelligence research theme and Prof. Carsten Maple (Co-I) from Warwick Manufacturing Group have been further awarded a research grant by the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA), which is part of the Ministry of Defence, to continue with Phase 2 of the project R-DIPS - "Real-time Detection of Concealment of Intent for Passenger Screening." The project, which began on October 2019 and ends on February 2021, aims at developing a machine learning and computer vision solution to track, in real-time, multiple individuals across a set of non-overlapping surveillance cameras to detect those with suspicious behaviours and movements within an airport. The project will improve the screening process of passengers to detect those attempting to mask nefarious intent. The R-DIPS project is an international collaboration with Prof. Chang-Tsun Li who is also affiliated with Deakin University, Australia.

Prof. Yulan He from the department's Data Science and Human-Centred Computing research themes has been awarded a 3-year EPSRC grant to develop a new framework to study model/data uncertainty and model interpretability of AI systems. The interdisciplinary project will assist system stakeholders and developers to understand and reason about the (business, personal, social, etc.) impact of intelligent systems on the world in which they operate, and to understand how and why decisions are taken. It will run in collaboration with Dr. Ritabrata Dutta from the Statistics Department, and Dr. Nelly Bencomo and Prof. Pete Sawyer from Aston University.