Computer Science News

Another piece of excellent news: Dr Sayan Bhattacharya and Dr Tom Gur have been promoted to Associate Professor, effective from 1 May 2020. Quoting from their recommendations,

Dr Bhattacharya has attracted a very competitive EPSRC New Investigator grant and a high-profile UK-Israel collaborative grant with the Weizmann Institute... . Dr Bhattacharya’s high standing in the research community is confirmed by his memberships of the programme committees of prestigious conferences, as well as his organisation of international research events. … Dr Bhattacharya has developed a new 3rd-year core module for Discrete Mathematics students and delivered it for the past three years, as well as now teaching most of a key 1st-year core module for the same degree course.

and

Dr Gur has attracted a highly prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, as well as growing his international leading publications record. He is also growing a successful own research group, having recruited a PhD student and on track to employing several postdocs. … voluntarily exceeding his workload, Dr Gur has developed from scratch and currently teaches a popular 4th-year module on quantum computing. Mentioning here only some of his other contributions, Dr Gur also … is the organiser of the main departmental research seminar, was an active contributor to the department’s recent Athena SWAN submission, and has been developing fruitful links with several industrial partners.

it remains to say many congratulations!

Dr Fayyaz Minhas of the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) lab at the Computer Science department is a co-PI on a £97K grant by Cancer Research UK’s Early Detection Committee to explore machine learning for discovery of pre-neoplastic signature in mesothelioma. He will be working closely with the PI Dr Jan Lukas Robertus, who is a Senior Consultant Cardiothoracic Pathologist at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Dr Minhas will lead on the machine learning and computational pathology side of the project.

In the current challenging context, a piece of excellent news: Dr Jane Sinclair and Dr Yulia Timofeeva have been promoted to Professor, effective from 1 June 2020. Quoting from their recommendations,

Dr Sinclair is an established educational leader in the department, the faculty, the university, nationally and internationally. Going far beyond development and delivery of teaching in the department, many of the main educational advances in Computer Science in recent years are due to Dr Sinclair, … Nationally and internationally, building on her excellent educational scholarship that has recently won a prestigious Best Paper Award, Dr Sinclair has shown sustained leadership in her work with ACM (the world’s computing society) as well as the leading national organisations Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC) and Computing At School (CAS), resulting in substantial impact on secondary and higher computing education in the UK and beyond.

and

Dr Timofeeva has an established international reputation for her research that spans several areas. Her recent successes with attracting external funding are impressive, including a £475K MRC grant and a major role in the £4.6M renewal of the MathSys CDT. … Dr Timofeeva has a strong track record of engaging with a variety of stakeholders in the context of her research field, through her editorial work, conference organisation, and visiting appointments. She has played a leading role in the UK Mathematical Neuroscience Network, which facilitates joint efforts by top UK researchers to tackle real-life problems. … One of the most collegiate and efficient Computer Science academics, Dr Timofeeva has had a large number of key administrative roles in the department and the MathSys CDT.

it remains to say many congratulations!

We are delighted to report that Dr Claire Rocks has been promoted to Associate Professor, and that Dr Florin Ciucu and Dr Matthew Leeke have been promoted to Reader, effective from 1 June 2020. Quoting from Matt's recommendation,

Dr Leeke has a number of internationally excellent publications, and has contributed to several research grants, the two largest ones being strategic industrial collaborations. … In addition to his sustained teaching excellence in the department, Dr Leeke has led and contributed to a variety of key educational activities at the departmental, faculty and institutional levels.

from Florin's recommendation,

Dr Ciucu’s high esteem by members of his international research community is evidenced by his services in editing leading journals and being on programme committees of highly ranked conferences. … Dr Ciucu is known in the department for the quality of his teaching and high levels of student engagement in his modules, which have included a challenging but central MSc module in data analytics.

and from the recommendation for Claire,

Dr Rocks has been an educational leader in the department as well as nationally, both through her scholarship-led development and delivery of modules (1st-year and 3rd-year undergraduate, and most recently for IATL and Warwick in London), and her contributions in the Academic Studies Committee in Computer Science. … Dr Rocks has built institutional, regional and national reputations through her leadership of outreach and engagement activities. In addition to delivering CPD for teachers with the National Centre for Computing Education, Dr Rocks has played key roles in numerous events including the British Science Festival, the Festival of the Imagination, the Cheltenham Science Festival, and Sutton Trust Summer Schools.

it remains to say many congratulations!

The 17th Warwick Postgraduate Colloquium in Computer Science (WPCCS) was held on Monday 9 December, in the Mathematical Science Building for the first time. This year’s event saw 78 submissions from postgraduate research students in the Department. The submissions were split across six varied tracks, highlighting the breadth and depth of research currently being conducted by PhD students within the Department.

Student presentations were supplemented with two engaging guest talks from academics in the Department. Torsten Mütze captured everyone's attention with the mathematics behind origami, and Feng Hao enlightened the audience on the encryption challenges behind e-voting. The day concluded with a festive drinks reception, sponsored by the Department’s two Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), at which prizes were awarded to the best posters and presentations.

PhD student attendee Jonathan Davies said, “It was very rewarding for me to present at WPCCS this year. It gave me the opportunity to share my research with others and engage in stimulating conversation with my fellow postgraduate colleagues. The guest talks, in particular, were thought-provoking and engaging. I look forward to presenting at WPCCS in the future."

Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu, Director of Postgraduate Research and CS CDT, said, “It was a pleasure to attend WPCCS this year and to celebrate the excellent work that has been undertaken by our PhD students in the past year. It was great to see how everyone was having research discussions and exchanging ideas with each other.”

Prize Winners

• Best Presentation - John Pocock
• Best Poster - Tom Wood
• Best in Computational Biology - John Pocock, Rawan Abulsayli and Hammam Alghamdi
• Best in Theory, Foundations, and Discrete Mathematics - Alex Dixon and Thesjaswini Raghavan
• Best in Computer Security and Networks - Jasmine Grosso and Shin Wan
• Best in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence - Tom Wood, Abeer Almowallad, Gabriele Pergola, Haoyi Wang, Junyu Li and Helen McKay
• Best in High Performance Computing and Databases - Richard Kirk and Dean Chester
• Best in Urban Science - Jonathan Davies, Teddy Cunningham, Elisa Baioni, Ivana Tosheva and Shanaka Perera

The Department of Computer Science and the Mathematics Institute jointly hosted, last Saturday 7th December, the Christmas Meeting for 2019 of the British Society for the History of Mathematics.

Our Departments have a long and strong association with the BSHM which has an established tradition of having its Christmas meeting in the Midlands. With about 50 participants, including some staff and students from both our Departments, there were 8 talks in the day ranging from figurate numbers in the 9th century, Islamic use of sexagesimal calculation for π and sine values in the 15th century, to fascinating details of Victorian data processing and the mathematical semantics of programming languages in more recent times.

There were plenty of interesting questions arising and lively discussions in the refreshment intervals. There was also a presentation of the BSHM Neumann Prize and the Society's AGM.

The day was widely acclaimed as enjoyable and successful. Our thanks are due to both Departments for their sponsorship, to the admin and technical support in Computer Science, and to the local organising work of Steve Russ and Adam Jones. Further information about the BSHM is at https://www.bshm.ac.uk/.

Full list of speakers:

• Helen Ross - Dicuil and triangular numbers
• Steve Russ - Visions in the night: Bolzano's anticipations of continuity
• Jane Wess - From Newton to Newcomen: mathematics and technology 1687-1800
• Troy Astarte - On the difficulty of describing difficult things
• Catalin Iorga - Known and unknown in Al-Kashi's mathematics
• Robin Wilson - Hunting and counting trees: the world of Cayley and Sylvester
• Chris Pritchard - From collecting coins to searching the archives: personal reflections on becoming a historian of mathematics
• Martin Campbell-Kelly - Victorian data processing