The Department of Computer Science celebrated the end of the academic year with a staff BBQ, along with some games of rounders and a tug of war.

Thank you everyone for your hard work this year!

Wednesday 3rd July 2024 saw 30+ colleagues interested in Artificial Intelligence and Pathology descend on Warwick University’s TIA Centre to hold a workshop.

Delegates from a variety of disciplines, including pathologists and data scientists, attended the workshop, on Campus. The focus of the workshop was to explore the Future Interface of Computing and Pathology.

The meeting was lively and interactive and will be the first in a series of workshops that will be hosted by the TIA Centre in furtherance of this subject area. Thank you to all those who participated.

If you would like to join in future workshops please contact the TIA Centre at tia@warwick.ac.uk.

Six papers from the Theory and Foundations Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications (DIMAP) have been accepted to the 65th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2024), the flagship conference in theoretical computer science that will be held on October 27 - 30, 2024 in Chicago, USA:

• "Reverse Mathematics of Complexity Lower Bounds" by Lijie Chen, Jiatu Li and Igor C. Oliveira.

• "Faster (Δ+1)-Edge Coloring: Breaking the m n^1/2 Time Barrier" by Sayan Bhattacharya, Din Carmon, Martin Costa, Shay Solomon and Tianyi Zhang.
• "Fully Dynamic k-Clustering with Fast Update Time and Small Recourse" by Sayan Bhattacharya, Martin Costa, Naveen Garg, Silvio Lattanzi and Nikos Parotsidis.
• "The Tractability Border of Reachability in Simple Vector Addition Systems with States" by Dmitry Chistikov, Wojciech Czerwiński, Łukasz Orlikowski, Filip Mazowiecki, Henry Sinclair-Banks and Karol Węgrzycki.

• "Optimal Coding Theorems for Randomized Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications" by Shuichi Hirahara, Zhenjian Lu and Mikito Nanashima.
• "On the Complexity of Avoiding Heavy Elements" by Zhenjian Lu, Igor C. Oliveira, Hanlin Ren and Rahul Santhanam.

A recent paperLink opens in a new window published by Dr. Ian MertzLink opens in a new window, a postdoctoral researcher in the Theory and Foundations (FoCS)Link opens in a new window research group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP)Link opens in a new window, has disproved a longstanding conjecture on the limitations of space-bounded computation.

For many years it had been believed that a function, known as Tree Evaluation, would be the key to separating two fundamental classes of problems: those computable quickly (P), and those computable in low space (L). Mertz, along with James CookLink opens in a new window of Toronto, builds on their earlier work to show a low-space algorithm for Tree Evaluation, thus refuting this belief. In particular, their technique has attracted attention for shedding new light on the power of space-bounded computation, suggesting novel approaches to age-old questions in complexity theory. They show that space can be used in surprising ways, with the same memory serving many simultaneous purposes.

The paper, which Mertz will present at the 56th Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC 2024)Link opens in a new window, has been invited to the special issue of SIAM Journal on Computing (SICOMP)Link opens in a new window for the conference. STOC is the main conference of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and one of the two premier venues for theoretical computer science, with only the top results being invited for publication in the special issue.

Mertz has also presented this work at many venues, including the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Columbia University, Oxford University, Warwick (Online Complexity Seminar)Link opens in a new window, McGill University, and others.

We are happy to announce two recent promotions in the department effective from 1 August 2024:

• Dr Amina Asif has been promoted to Assistant Professor
• Dr Andrew Hague has been promoted to Associate Professor

Many congratulations to our colleagues for their achievements!

The work of Professor Graham Cormode has been recognized with a “test of time” award. The ACM SIGMOD conference presents an award each year for the paper from SIGMOD 10-12 years previously that has had the biggest impact, and passed the “test-of-time”. The 2014 paper “PrivBayes: private data release via bayesian networks” (Jun Zhang, Graham Cormode, Cecilia M. Procopiuc, Divesh Srivastava, Xiaokui Xiao) was selected for this honour. The award will be presented at the 2024 ACM SIGMOD Conference in Santiago.

Toby Flynn, PhD student in the department's High-Performance and Scientific Computing group, supervised by Prof. Gihan Mudalige together with Dr. Robert Manson-Sawko at IBM Research UK received the best paper award at the 38th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2024) last week in San Francisco US. IPDPS is one of the most prominent and high ranking conferences in parallel and distributed computing, now in its 38th year.

The paper titled "Performance-Portable Multiphase Flow Solutions with Discontinuous Galerkin Methods", details the development of a new performance portable solver workflow using Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for developing multiphase flow simulations based on the OP2 domain-specific language. Results demonstrate scaling on both CPU and GPU systems including UK's national supercomputer, ARCHER2 at EPCC Edinburgh and the European Petascale Supercomputer, LUMI hosted by CSC Finland. The work is a collaboration with IBM Research UK supported by an iCASE award funded jointly by IBM and EPSRC.

The paper pre-print is available here.