Computer Science News

Congratulations to all our graduands receiving their degrees today!

More info:

2014 student awards

Today's Honorary Graduands

We congratuate Dr Matt Leeke, who was commended for his teaching in the Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence this year. Matt is a module organiser for CS132 Computer Organisation and Architecture, CS240 Software Engineering Principles, and CS257 Advanced Computer Architecture.

We also congratulate Robert Bird who was commended in the WATEPGR awards. Robert has taught on more than 10 modules in his time at the university, including being invited to teach outside of his department. He is known for his ability to build strong relationships with students to encourage them in their learning.

This year's awards have been one of the most successful ever. Record numbers of nominations were received from staff, students and alumni, which resulted in over 70 individuals being nominated for the hard work they put into their teaching.

Full list of WATE 2014 winners

Full list of WATEPGR 2014 winners

Research highlights the future of energy-aware high-performance computing

Leipzig, June 18, 2014. As reported in Inside HPC.

With energy costs a growing concern for High Performance Computing, Allinea Software will demonstrate its vision of a greener future with a preview of new tool extensions for application energy usage optimization at this year's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'14) in Leipzig.

With larger numbers of data centers consuming over 1MW of power or having electricity bills topping $1M, energy is focussing the minds of the system sponsors and managers, says David Lecomber, CEO of Allinea Software.

Allinea Software worked with application performance experts at the University of Warwick to investigate novel energy and power measuring techniques for scientific application workloads.

Energy usage data is increasingly available at the system level, and our research also explored proxies for energy such as hardware counters to see where they could give deeper insight, said Professor Stephen Jarvis of University of Warwick’s HPC Performance Analysis Group.

The research supported the view that in many cases applications can reduce energy costs without adversely impacting actual run time.

Improving the green credentials of hardware and data centers is vital, and progress is good, but applications must also play their part. Energy optimization is a natural fit for our performance tools, adds Lecomber.

With the variety of workloads that HPC centers have, a ‘one size fits all’ strategy is a costly error – and so Allinea Performance Reports will provide information for application users and system managers to enable them to tune system and application parameters such as CPU frequency for optimal energy use for each application.

Our developer-centric tool, Allinea MAP, will allow scientific code developers to focus energy optimization down into the source code – making changes to the application to drive faster performance and lower energy consumption at the same time.

This research has been supported by the Technology Strategy Board's Emerging Technologies Energy Efficient Computing Programme.

Warwick and King’s College London, in partnership with New York University, plan a major initiative in collaboration with the GLA and the London Borough of Southwark to launch 'CUSP London', a branch of NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, to be based at Canada Water from 2018. The announcement was made on Monday 17 June 2014 by Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, at an event organised by Bloomberg to mark the start of London Technology Week.

London will be the first city to build upon the success of CUSP in New York, which was launched in April 2012 by Mayor Bloomberg and of which Warwick is an academic partner. In developing CUSP London, the partners will benefit from the experience in New York City, where CUSP is now established as a leader in the new field of urban science and informatics.

Professor Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor of Warwick commented: "I welcome the launch of CUSP London, both as a researcher of the dynamics of cities, and as Vice-Chancellor of Warwick which is a partner both in the CUSP London initiative and the original CUSP in New York. CUSP London will be a significant engine of applied urban science research, innovation and education that will work with London as a living laboratory applying research to the needs of our capital and to other great cities."

CUSP London will bring together researchers, businesses, local authorities and government agencies to apply urban science to improving public health and wellbeing. It will draw on the real experience and ‘big data’ available in cities, thereby using the cities themselves as living laboratories to tackle their most significant issues. CUSP London will complement the MedCity initiative which the GLA recently launched with King’s and other academic partners, and the Mayor of London’s Smart London plan.

Experts at CUSP London will use data to develop deeper understanding and practical solutions to a wide range of challenges affecting people’s everyday lives. The international partnership will also train a new generation of postgraduate and PhD level urban scientists with the skills and knowledge to benefit London and other major UK and global cities.

Professor Sir Richard Trainor KBE, Principal of King’s, commented: "If we are to tackle the increasingly complex challenges facing London and other cities, we need initiatives like CUSP London. It will train a new generation of urban scientists, and harness expertise, research insights and big data from across the public and private sectors in order to enhance health and efficiency in increasingly populated and fast changing cities."

It is anticipated that CUSP London would generate around 180 construction jobs for two years, and once fully operational, to accommodate around 100 researchers and 500 students. CUSP London will seek development funding from public, industry and philanthropic sources.

Steve Koonin, Director of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, said: "We are delighted to welcome London to the CUSP family. We are honored by their strong support of our work and the steps taken to build on our successes in New York City. Our New York team stands ready to work with Kings College and the University of Warwick as the CUSP model is expanded abroad."

On May 21 2014, our Division of Theory and Foundations, jointly with DIMAP, organized DIMAP Algorithms Day 2014. The goal of the event was to bring together the UK community of researchers and graduate students interested in the study of Algorithms, Data Structures, and Complexity.

The event had an outstanding list of invited speakers from the leading academic institutions and research labs (Alexandr Andoni (Microsoft Research Silicon Valley), Graham Cormode (Warwick), Edith Elkind (Oxford), Leszek Gąsieniec (Liverpool), Aleksander Mądry (EPFL)) presenting the recent advances in Algorithms and its applications, and attracted over 60 participants from over the UK and from abroad.

As reported in 'Computer Business Review' and 'Computer World' (14/5/2014)

A new partnership between the University of Warwick and Bull Information Systems has been announced supporting IT developments in Big Data. The new partnership will allow leading research scientists from the university to work alongside business consultants and developers from one of Europe’s foremost suppliers of computing hardware, software and consulting services.

“So much has been discussed about the possibilities of big data yet few businesses have the advanced expertise needed to go beyond this,” said Andrew Carr, CEO of Bull UK and Ireland.

“They may already have a vision but be unsure about how to get there - or they may not even be aware of what they could achieve with the data they hold and need help to identify the opportunities.

“By taking this challenge beyond the mainstream business environment and engaging the best brains possible on the subject, we can help organisations start to realise big data implementations by injecting a new dynamism into high performance project development that will enable them to be the first to market with their initiatives.”

Professor Stephen Jarvis, who is leading the partnership at Warwick, stated that "Bull is committed to open standards and 'open ICT solutions' which allows users, including ourselves, to gain real insight and expertise in developing data analytics infrastructures as well as developing skills in using that infrastructure.”

“Organisations are bombarded by data in diverse forms from social media to connected sensors, but few know how to combine structured and unstructured forms and convert data to information to give real value. We aim to help them overcome these barriers and to develop great commercial applications that will significantly improve the experience of their customers.”

Ebrahim Ardeshir-Larijani has passed his PhD viva and his thesis has been approved, subject to minor corrections. His thesis is titled "Automated Equivalence Checking of Quantum Information Systems". Quantum information processing is an emerging technology and verification of quantum protocols is important for the design and development of quantum communication and cryptographic systems. Ebrahim's thesis presents languages (sequential and concurrent) for describing quantum systems and techniques for checking equivalence. The work has resulted in two joint papers (with Simon Gay and Rajagopal Nagarajan) in good conferences, TACAS 2013 and TACAS 2014.

Ebrahim was supervised by Dr. Ranko Lazic and Prof. Rajagopal Nagarajan, the external examiner was Dr. Ross Duncan (Strathclyde) and his internal examiner was Dr. Jane Sinclair.