Computer Science News

We welcome our new students who have joined the department this week and congratulate them for their excellent results prior to coming here! For the first time ever, they are joining us for a Welcome Week before lectures start next week. We are excited to have so many outstanding new students and are looking forward to seeing them become excellent Computer Scientists in the coming years!

Many congratulations to Dr Claire Rocks on her election to a Fellowship of the Warwick International Higher Education Academy.

A WIHEA Fellowship recognises and rewards outstanding achievements in learning and teaching and is an exceptional opportunity to engage with colleagues across the university, improve the student experience and make a genuine difference to Warwick through research, debate and policy formation.

In the recently published National Student Survey (NSS) 2018, Computer Science at Warwick ranked 4th of the 108 computing departments in the UK, with an overall student satisfaction rate of 94%. Among the Russell Group, an elite group of research-led universities in the UK, Computer Science at Warwick is ranked 1st for overall student satisfaction for the second consecutive year.

The NSS canvasses student satisfaction across all departments at all universities and remains the biggest survey of student satisfaction in the UK. Students are asked to respond on topics including teaching quality, learning opportunities, academic support, and organisation and management. Among the Russell Group, Computer Science at Warwick ranked first or second in almost all major categories.

Investment in new teaching and laboratory facilities is well underway, with Warwick’s new Mathematical Sciences Building soon to open and staff eagerly preparing for an exceptionally talented student intake for the 2018-19 academic year.

This year’s Warwick Postgraduate Colloquium in Computer Science, WPCCS 2018, took place on Friday 29th June. The colloquium, an annual student-run event, showcased research performed by the postgraduate research (PGR) students in Computer Science, the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) and the CDT in Urban Science and Progress.

Continuing a new tradition for the colloquium, this year’s event was held in The Oculus, University of Warwick. In addition to presentations from students in each of the department’s research areas, staff and external speakers offered guest talks. These centred on language design patterns in 2018, the evolution and horizons of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and WebEXR, an online high dynamic range image viewer.

Florin Ciucu, the director of postgraduate research studies in the Department of Computer Science, said of the event:

WPCCS is an excellent opportunity for our students to widely expose where they currently stand in their research. It’s a fantastic way for them to contribute by sharing their research experiences, ideas and visions with their peers and the wider research community.

WPCCS 2018 showcased over 45 presentations and 25 posters of the latest research in the Department of Computer Science. WPCCS aims to foster an air of collaborative research amongst the department’s PGR students and open many conversations between the department’s postgraduate researchers and others. Thank you to all who attended and participated, we look forward to seeing you again next year.

To find out more about WPCCS 2018 or to provide feedback, please visit https://warwick.ac.uk/wpccs18.

We are delighted to report that Dr Theo Damoulas and Dr Gihan Mudalige have successfully completed their probations early, and become Associate Professors at the start of this month. Quoting from their probationary review reports,

Gihan has had a number of successes with attracting substantial research funding, most recently for two projects with AWE PLC, and one with Rolls Royce PLC. A further major success is Gihan’s Royal Society Industrial Fellowship, which will run over the next 4 academic years at 50% of Gihan’s time. ... Dr Gihan Mudalige is an outstanding and valuable member of the department’s academic staff, whose many likely future contributions to both research and teaching we are looking forward to.

and

Dr Theo Damoulas is a valuable asset to both Computer Science and Statistics departments in all of the research, teaching, administration and collegiality areas. Theo is already a next-generation research leader at the national and international levels, in particular enhancing the university's partnerships with the Alan Turing Institute, CUSP London, King's College London, and New York University.

it remains to say many congratulations!

Adi Shamir, the Paul and Marlene Borman Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, has been elected this week a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He is a co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman), a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme (along with Uriel Feige and Amos Fiat), one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science.

In 1976/77, Adi was a post-doctoral researcher in Computer Science at Warwick!

In the Logic, Semantics, Automata and Theory of Programming track of the 45th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP), three out of 30 accepted papers are by members of the department. ICALP is one of the most selective and longest established international conferences in computer science, and the flagship annual event of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. The papers are:

• Reducing CMSO Model Checking to Highly Connected Graphs by Ramanujan M. S., Daniel Lokshtanov, Saket Saurabh and Meirav Zehavi
• O-Minimal Invariants for Linear Loops by Shaull Almagor, Dmitry Chistikov, Joel Ouaknine and James Worrell
• When is Containment Decidable for Probabilistic Automata? by Laure Daviaud, Ranko Lazić, Marcin Jurdziński, Filip Mazowiecki, Guillermo Perez and James Worrell