Over a hundred students gathered last week in the Panorama Room for a reception, poster display and then Award Ceremony for the Warwick Advantage Awards. They were all winners of Awards of various kinds in recognition of outstanding extra-curricular contributions to life at Warwick and the local community.

We were delighted that four Award winners were from Computer Science. Main Awards were presented to Phillip Taylor (CS3) and Hoi Zin (Jackie) Tran (DM3). Gold Awards were gained by two Computer and Business Studies students Samantha Edwards and Nikhita Giridhar (pictured above). Among many activities over her first two years at Warwick Samantha has visited numerous local schools (a different one each week!) as one of the Warwick Technology Volunteers to introduce the programming environment Scratch to pupils and teachers. Interestingly Nikhita, a final year student, commented, "I think it counted significantly towards my getting a job offer from Goldman Sachs that I done so many extra-curricular things during my time at Warwick."

The Warwick Advantage Award provides the opportunity to achieve University recognition and reward for the time and effort that students put into societies, sports clubs, campaigns, committees, volunteering, events, URSS research, work experience & everything else that isn't a degree requirement. Find out more at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/advantage/awards/

ACM has named Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science. Valiant brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and computer vision. He also launched several subfields of theoretical computer science, and developed models for parallel computing. The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing," is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc. Les Valiant received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Warwick in 1974. His PhD supervisor was Professor Mike Paterson.

Dr Abd-Nacer Bouchekhima joined the department as a Research Fellow after obtaining his PhD in 2009 from the MOAC DTC and then holding an appointment as Assistant Professor in KFUPM (Saudi Arabia). He will work together with Dr Yulia Timofeeva on a project funded by the BBSRC that aims to investigate the role of calcium dynamics in neuronal computation underlying important brain functions.

The Mathematical Association of America has awarded its 2011 David Robbins Prize for the two papers: “Overhang” by Mike Paterson and Uri Zwick (Tel Aviv) and “Maximum Overhang” by Mike Paterson, Yuval Peres (Microsoft), Peter Winkler (Dartmouth), Mikkel Thorup (AT&T) and Uri Zwick.

The prize, presented on 7 January 2011 at the AMS-MAA Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans, is given every three years for papers reporting on novel research in algebra, combinatorics, or discrete mathematics. Both papers appeared in 2009 in the American Mathematical Monthly. (The first of these had already won a 2010 Lester Ford Award of the MAA.)