Computer Science News
Combating oral cancer in Pakistan
Oral cancer is Pakistan’s most prevalent cancer, likely caused by the widespread use of smokeless tobacco, and poor oral hygiene. Researchers at the University of Warwick, led by Professor Nasir Rajpoot, in collaboration with University Hospitals Coventry, Warwickshire NHS Trust and a cancer hospital in Pakistan, are using EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account funding to develop a new and revolutionary digital pathology system to analyse image data for cancerous samples, leading to better diagnosis and treatment.
This news item first appeared in EPSRC Pioneer: https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/pubs/pioneer18/
BBSRC funding success for Till Bretschneider
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.
Warwick Postgraduate Colloquium in Computer Science 2017
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/
Ranko Lazic appointed Leverhulme Research Fellow
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.
Dmitry Chistikov joins the Department as a new Assistant Professor
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.
Graham Cormode awarded 2017 Adams Prize
Professor Graham Cormode has been awarded the 2017 Adams Prize by the Cambridge Faculty of Mathematics. The award recognizes his work on "Statistical Analysis of Big Data", and is awarded jointly with Professor Richard Samworth of Cambridge. Professor Cormode says,
My work, in common with Prof Samworth's, is about finding mathematical representations of data that allow useful information to be extracted effectively and accurately. These techniques allow ever larger quantities of data to be handled on ordinary computers.
Professor Cormode's work on "data sketches" has been used in companies such as Netflix, Yahoo, Twitter, Google, AT&T and Sprint. He is currently leading Warwick's involvement in the Alan Turing Institute at London, and working on questions to do with verification of machine learning, and privacy.
Floods and hurricanes predicted with social media
Social media can warn us about extreme weather events before they happen – such as hurricanes, storms and floods – according to new research by the University of Warwick.
Nataliya Tkachenko, with her supervisors in the Department of Computer Science, has found that photographs and key words posted online can signal weather risks developing in specific locations and times – for example, posts about water levels rising can alert the authorities to a potential flood.
Nataliya Tkachenko explains predicting floods & hurricanes with social media 7:30pm tonight on the BBC World Service.