Computer Science News

We are pleased to announce that two of our academic staff members, Dr Jonny Foss and Dr Ian Saunders, have been awarded professional fellowships by Advance HE, recognising their commitment to educational excellence.

iGEM is a global synthetic biology competition that involves more than 400 teams worldwide.

The University of Warwick iGEM team 2024 – team BEACON – took part in the iGEM competition, which culminated with the iGEM Jamboree in Paris, at the end of October. We would like to congratulate Aaron Lee (CSE) for their fantastic work on the project within the team including 9 other UG students from various departments, including Life Sciences, Chemistry, Engineering and Mathematics. For their interdisciplinary project, they addressed the need for developing better ways to recycle lanthanides, such as the ones found in electronic devices. They engineered bacteria to scavenge for lanthanide ions and swim towards a point for collection through an engineered chemotactic system. Team BEACON were awarded a Gold medal (grade) at the Jamboree, in recognition of their success during the project.

A paperLink opens in a new window co-authored by Arpan MukhopadhyayLink opens in a new window has received the Best Paper Award at ACM Mobihoc 2024Link opens in a new window. Mobihoc is a premier international conference on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing. The other authors in the paper are Samira Ghanbarian (uWaterloo), Ravi R. Mazumdar (uWaterloo), and Fabrice Guillemin (Orange Labs, France).

The paper addresses the problem of optimally allocating processors to parallelisable tasks having arbitrary concave speed-up functions. In general, determining the optimal number of processors to allocate to each task in an online fashion is a hard problem since allocating too many processors to one job will make those processors unavailable to other jobs whereas allocating too few processors will result in a small speed-up for the job. The paper proposes a simple randomised algorithm for determining the optimal number of processors to allocate to each job without requiring preemption (or repacking). It shows that the proposed algorithm is asymptotically optimal as the number of processors becomes large (which is often the case in modern clouds) and is also robust to variations in the job size distribution. This is the first time such an algorithm has been found in the literature.

Neha Rino, a PhD student in the Theory and Foundations group in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Cyber Security group at WMG, has won an Oded Maler award at FORMATS 2024.

The Oded Maler award is a distinction presented for the best paper of the International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems (FORMATS). This year's edition of the conference was held in September in Calgary, Canada, jointly with QEST (International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems) as a common research forum dedicated to quantitative modelling, analysis, and verification.

Neha's paper, "Efficiently Computable Distance-Based Robustness for a Practical Fragment of STL", is co-authored with Mohammed Foughali and Eugene Asarin, both from Université Paris Cité and IRIF in Paris, France, where Neha completed the Master's degree (ENS Paris-Saclay) prior to joining Warwick.

Neha's paper contributes to the research framework of quantitative monitoring, which is the analysis of individual executions of systems which yields numerical output (real numbers), rather than binary yes/no. The paper formulates and solves, by an efficient algorithm, a new problem of this kind: computing a real number that characterises to which extent the given execution of a real-time system satisfies its specification expressed in Signal Temporal Logic (STL).

PhD positions are available at the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) group in the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, UK. The group has strong ties with the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP), established in 2007 jointly with the Warwick Mathematics Institute and Warwick Business School. Together with DIMAP, the group is one of the leading theory groups in Europe, with regular publications in top international conferences and journals in theoretical computer science.

Eight papers authored by Computer Science researchers from Warwick have been accepted for publication at the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, the leading international venue for machine learning research, which will be held on 10-15 December 2024 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada:

• Generating Origin-Destination Matrices in Neural Spatial Interaction Models, by Ioannis Zachos, Mark Girolami, and Theodoros Damoulas
• Interventionally Consistent Surrogates for Complex Simulation Models, by Joel Dyer, Nicholas Bishop, Yorgos Felekis, Fabio Massimo Zennaro, Ani Calinescu, Theodoros Damoulas, and Michael Wooldridge
• Learning the Expected Core of Strictly Convex Stochastic Cooperative Games, by Phuong Nam Tran, The Anh Ta, Shuqing Shi, Debmalya Mandal, Yali Du, and Long Tran-Thanh
• Physics-Informed Variational State-Space Gaussian Processes, by Oliver Hamelijnck, Arno Solin, and Theodoros Damoulas
• SARAD: Spatial Association-Aware Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis for Multivariate Time Series, by Zhihao Dai, Ligang He, Shuanghua Yang, and Matthew Leeke
• Symmetric Linear Bandits with Hidden Symmetry, by Phuong Nam Tran, The Anh Ta, Debmalya Mandal, and Long Tran-Thanh
• The Effectiveness of Surprisingly Popular Voting with Partial Preferences, by Hadi Hosseini, Debmalya Mandal, and Amrit Puhan
• What makes unlearning hard and what to do about it, by Kairan Zhao, Meghdad Kurmanji, George-Octavian Bărbulescu, Eleni Triantafillou, and Peter Triantafillou

We are seeking PhD candidates in the topic of Multiagent Systems and related areas, with particular emphasis on one or more of: computational social choice, algorithmic game theory, multiagent learning, and social and economic networks. The multiagent systems researchers at University of Warwick include Markus Brill, Debmalya Mandal, Ramanujan Sridharan, Long Tran-Thanh, and Paolo Turrini.

The expected starting date is October 2025 or as soon as possible thereafter. The deadline for our internal application round is 1 November 2024. To apply, please fill out the application form (which will ask you to upload a CV and a letter of motivation). We aim to have interviews between November 11th and 22nd, 2024. Top-ranked candidates will be put forward for a fully funded position through the Computer Science Centre for Doctoral Training and Research (CDT) by January 15th 2025.