Computer Science News

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.

The CDT (Centre for Doctoral Training) in Urban Science has started! 10 incoming PhD students and 4 academic staff travelled to New York last week to take part in the CUSP-based City Challenge week. Students had talks from industry and city partners, and got to work in mixed institution/nationality groups on example case studies in urban informatics.

CUSP is an applied science research institute dedicated to researching and creating new solutions for the pressing and complex challenges confronting the world’s growing cities. CUSP is a significant component of New York’s Applied Sciences NYC Initiative. This research institute will spark new technologies, discoveries and innovations, will create new businesses and jobs, and will educate the workforce for the high-tech urban science sector. New research and technologies developed at CUSP are expected to generate $5.5 billion in economic activity and create a total of 7,700 jobs over the next 30 years.

Professor Graham Cormode from the Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

The Wolfson Research Merit Award is one of the most prestigious UK awards, supported by the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science. The scheme provides up to 5 years’ funding after which the award holder continues with a permanent post at the host university. Jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the scheme aims to provide universities with additional support to enable them to attract science talent from overseas and retain respected UK scientists of outstanding achievement and potential. Professor Graham Cormode's research will focus on "Small summaries for big data".

The Wolfson Foundation is a grant-making charity established in 1955. Funding is given to support excellence and the focus of the award is a salary enhancement.

The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship of many of the world’s most distinguished scientists drawn from all areas of science, engineering, and medicine. The Society’s fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters of the 1660s, is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.

(See also The Royal Society announcement).

More information about Professor Graham Cormode's research is available at his web page at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/dcs/people/graham_cormode.