Computer Science News

The final of the School Cyber Games, part of the Cyber Security Challenge’s programme for schools, saw Stockport School emerge victorious once again as UK Schools Cyber Security Champions. This was the third time the competition has been run, and the second time the final has been held at the University of Warwick’s Department of Computer Science.

The Cabinet Office-backed competition aims to raise awareness of the excitement of a career in cyber security amongst a new generation of young people in order to address a growing skills shortage in this sector, as well as help teachers tackle the huge changes being made in the computing curriculum in schools.

Eight teams of Key Stage 4 students overcame a series of fun code-breaking and cyber security themed challenges to claim top prizes, including a cash prize of £1,000 and Hexbug robot kits. There were two teams from Stockport School, as well as teams from, The Kings School (Chester), King Edward IV School (Chelmsford), Grimsby Institute, High School for Girls (Gloucester), Hailybury School (Hertfordshire) and Ysgol Maesydderwen (Powys). Each was selected after finishing as the highest scorers from schools all over the country who registered for the first stage of the Cyber Security Challenge’s Schools Programme, an online code-cracking competition.

Each challenge was devised by experienced cyber security experts at Cyber Security Challenge sponsors and partners, including BT, Bletchley Park, Birmingham City University, the Cabinet Office, Cisco, CompTIA, MWR/Dataline, Raytheon, The Smallpeice Trust and Warwick Manufacturing Group. Brian Higgins, who co-ordinates the Cyber Security Challenge’s programme for schools, was the Gamesmaster.

On completion of these challenges, the teams then had to put together the clues completing each challenge had given them and crack one final code against the clock to discover the password needed to access the winning computer. The winning team from Stockport School managed to interpret the clues and discover the password in less than two minutes!

There was also a good deal of press attention, including a reports from Newsround and the Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jan/06/computer-hacking-security-teaching-schools)

UK universities are evaluated on the quality of their research every six years. The results of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), announced by the Higher Education Funding Council today, rank Warwick Computer Science 2nd out of 89 UK computing departments.

REF assesses the quality of research outputs (academic papers, software, etc.) and the impact that this research has had (including improvements to society and business). Warwick’s output was ranked the best in the country, while its research impact was ranked joint second (with the University of Cambridge).

Professor Stephen Jarvis, Chair of the Department of Computer Science, commented:

We are delighted with this result. Warwick Computer Science produces world-leading research, both in the theoretical underpinnings of computer science and in its translation to real-world problems. Our work over the past six years has created new businesses, developed new standards, generated IP for new products, underpinned national security and defence, and impacted on social policy in education and health.

This result comes on the back of an excellent year. Warwick has been named University of the Year in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2015, and Warwick Computer Science was recently ranked as one of the best departments in the world in the 2014 QS Worldwide University Rankings.

Research Excellence Framework 2014: Institutions ranked by Subject

Further Information

• Times Higher Education: REF2014 results
• Research Excellence at Warwick

The Departments of Statistics and Computer Science are seeking a new Assistant Professor in the area of Data Science.

An enthusiastic individual is sought for this unique opportunity to be part of the newly created Warwick Data Science Institute (WDSI), which reflects the commitment of the Department of Statistics and the Department of Computer Science, in collaboration with the Warwick Mathematics Institute, to a coherent methodological approach to the fundamentals of Data Science and the challenges of complex data sets. In addition, the departments of Computer Science and Statistics have created a joint undergraduate degree programme in Data Science, which has recruited its first students in September 2014. You would be naturally involved in this exciting development, which constitutes the first course of its kind in the UK.

You will have knowledge of the current issues in Data Science and the drive to address them at a fundamental level while being part of a collaborative team from researchers across the mathematical sciences at Warwick. You will help shape Warwick’s research and teaching leadership in this fast-developing discipline. This is an opportunity to be part of an exciting collaboration between the Mathematical Science departments at Warwick.

Informal enquires can be addressed to any of Professors Mark Steel (M.Steel@warwick.ac.uk), Stephen Jarvis (S.A.Jarvis@warwick.ac.uk), David Firth (D.Firth@warwick.ac.uk), or Graham Cormode (G.Cormode@warwick.ac.uk), or to any other senior member of the Warwick Computer Science and Statistics departments.

You should have a PhD in Statistics, Computer Science or Mathematics or an equivalent qualification.

It is expected that interviews will take place in January 2015.

Start date: Flexible, although we expect the successful candidate to be in post by 1 October, 2015.

Professor Dan Král has been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work on combinatorial limits.

Philip Leverhulme Prize is awarded to outstanding scholars who have made a substantial and recognised contribution to their particular field of study, recognised at an international level, and where the expectation is that their greatest achievement is yet to come.

The research focus of the prize, the theory of combinatorial limits, is a recently emerged and rapidly evolving area of mathematics, which led to opening new links between analysis, combinatorics, computer science, group theory and probability theory.The analytic view of large discrete structures resulted in a substantial progress on many notoriously difficult extremal combinatorics questions. It also gave new understanding of aspects of important concepts such as regularity decompositions. Still, many fundamental problems remain widely open. A particularly challenging problem is finding a robust notion of convergence that would unify the existing notions for dense and sparse discrete structures. In relation to extremal combinatorics, problems of a great significance include a full description of low dimensional projections of the body of feasible limit densities or the existence of finitely forcible (determined) configurations in the extremal points of this body as conjectured by Lovász and Szegedy.

Dr Nathan Griffiths has been awarded a new EPSRC grant titled “JASPR: Justified Assessments of Service Provider Reputation”, which is to run jointly with KCL. JASPR aims to improve the way that services are discovered, selected and used by providing rich, personalised reputation assessments of services with the rationale behind those assessments. It is particularly targeted at giving small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) better exposure to large clients by reducing clients' reliance on extensive market histories or opaque online reviews that do not account for personalised needs.

Dr Ranko Lazic and Dr Marcin Jurdzinski have been awarded a research grant from the EPSRC for the next 2.5 years, entitled 'Counter Automata: Verification and Synthesis'. They will collaborate with Prof. James Worrell and Prof. Joel Ouaknine of the University of Oxford, to develop new automated procedures for analysing counter automata that will ultimately aid the design, modelling, verification, and analysis of complex computer systems. Commenting on the project, Dr Christoph Wintersteiger from Microsoft Research Ltd wrote that it 'has potential to significantly influence the next generation of Satisfiability Modulo Theories solvers [...] that in leading software industry today, are at the core of many advanced program analysis, testing and model-based development tools'.

EPSRC have recently funded a Warwick/York/Imperial £1M CCP Flagship project on "A radiation-hydrodynamics code for the UK laser-plasma community”. This project aims to provide large-scale software development for internationally leading computational science in laser plasma physics. This comes on the back of the new Centre for Computational Plasma Physics established by Prof Arber (Physics) and Prof Jarvis (Computer Science). This EPSRC project will fund a postdoc in the High Performance Computing Group for three years.

The Department of Computer Science is proud to have received the Athena SWAN Bronze Award, valid until November 2017. The Athena SWAN Charter is recognising commitment to advancing women's careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) employment in higher education and research.

The Athena SWAN Charter is owned by Equality Challenge Unit. It is funded by ECU, the Department of Health, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Royal Society, the Biochemical Society, the Scottish Funding Council and the Higher Education Authority Ireland www.athenaswan.org.uk

This latest award, makes Warwick one of the few universities where all STEMM departments have Athena SWAN awards.

The Athena SWAN Charter, launched in June 2005, recognises commitment to advancing women's careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) employment in academia.

The beliefs underpinning the Charter are:

1. The advancement of science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine is fundamental to quality of life across the globe.
2. It is vitally important that women are adequately represented in what has traditionally been, and is still, a male-dominated area.
3. Science cannot reach its full potential unless it can benefit from the talents of the whole population, and until women and men can benefit equally from the opportunities it affords.