Computer Science News

Professor Nasir Rajpoot has been recognised by the Royal Society’s Wolfson Merit Award scheme, awarded to outstanding scientists to support their research careers at UK universities.

Rajpoot is the founding head of Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) Lab in the Computer Science department at Warwick, where a major focus of research is on developing novel machine learning based algorithms for analysis of digitised microscopic images of cancerous tissue slides with applications to computer-assisted diagnosis, prognosis and stratification of cancer. The award will support his work on digital profiling of tumour microenvironment.

He said: “I am delighted to accept this prestigious award. My research focus is on studying cellular patterns in the tumour microenvironment in order to help us better understand tumour-immune interactions and predict cancer progression, response to therapy, and survival. This award will provide significant prestige in helping us achieve our research objectives.”

In the recently released 2017 National Student Survey results, Warwick Computer Science ranked 2^nd of the 104 computing departments in the UK, with an overall student satisfaction rate of 96%. Among Russell Group competitor institutions (an elite group of teaching and research universities in the UK), Computer Science at Warwick is ranked 1^st for overall student satisfaction.

The National Student Survey (NSS) canvasses student satisfaction across all departments at all UK 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 Russell Group institutions, Computer Science at Warwick ranked top in almost all major categories*:

• 1^st for overall student satisfaction
• 1^st for teaching quality
• 1^st for learning opportunities
• 1^st for assessment and feedback
• 1^st for academic support
• 1^st for learning resources
• 1^st for learning community
• 1^st for organisation and management

Throughout this summer investment continues in new teaching and laboratory facilities, with Warwick’s new interdisciplinary Mathematical Sciences building (for the Departments of Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics) opening in 2018.

*These figures are based on the Russell Group institutions for which there is publishable data for the subject of Computer Science in 2017.

Prof Till Bretschneider has been successful with a £0.5M BBSRC grant application ‘Reconstructing cell surface dynamics from lightsheet microscopy data’ and will work with a team at MRC LMB Cambridge (Dr Rob Kay) and the Warwick Medical School (Prof Andrew McAinsh and Dr Karuna Sampath) on this research from October 2017. They will develop new image-based computational modelling tools to investigate the biochemical regulation and physical forces that shape the cell membrane during cell motility and uptake of fluid. Both are important processes in embryonic development, tumour metastasis, and the immune response. The work will benefit from state of the art microscopy in Warwick’s Advanced Bioimaging Research Technology Platform that allows to acquire time series of 3D scans of single cells at high spatial and temporal resolution.

This year’s Warwick Postgraduate Colloquium in Computer Science (WPCCS) was held on Friday 30th June.

The event brought together postgraduate researchers from Computer Science and the CDT in Urban Science and Progress, and was held for the first time in the Oculus. This year, in addition to the student talks, the event also included both staff talks and external guest speakers.

The event was a huge success, with over fifty students and staff attending to both present and learn what their colleagues are researching. Thank you to all who attended and participated, and we look forward to seeing you next year!

To find out more about WPCCS 2017 or to provide feedback, please visit http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/research/wpccs/wpccs17/

Dr Ranko Lazic has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the 2017/18 academic year, to work on the Petri nets reachability conjecture.

Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are one of the most prominent models of concurrency, and their study is a vibrant research area. They have been used to discover bugs and eliminate vulnerabilities in network protocols, concurrent software, business processes, hardware circuits, and control systems.

Professor Artur Czumaj, head of the Foundations of Computer Science research group, has commented:

This prestigious fellowship will further strengthen the internationally leading research in theoretical computer science at Warwick, which recently has been also greatly boosted by the new permanent appointments of Dr Sayan Bhattacharya and Dr Dmitry Chistikov.

The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor Dmitry Chistikov, who will be associated with the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP).

After obtaining his Candidate of Sciences (equivalent to PhD) degree at the Department of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Moscow State University, Dmitry was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, as wel as at the University of Oxford.

The general area of Dmitry's research is theoretical computer science. In particular, he is interested in theoretical foundations of verification: its algorithmic aspects (decision and counting problems) as well as combinatorial aspects (extremal properties and characteristics of mathematical models of computation).

For more information about Dmitry's research, please see his web page.