The European Research Council (ERC) has announced that Dr Igor OliveiraLink opens in a new window is among the winners of its prestigious Starting Grant competition. According to the European Research Council: "The funding is worth in total €636 million and is part of the Horizon Europe programme. It will help excellent younger scientists, who have 2 to 7 years’ experience after their PhDs, to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas."

Igor OliveiraLink opens in a new window has been awarded a €1.5M ERC Starting grant for a 5-year project entitled "Synergies Between Complexity and Learning". The project aims to exchange ideas and techniques between Complexity Theory and Learning Theory to accelerate progress in both fields, broaden the arsenal of tools available to attack their open problems, as well as to obtain a deeper understanding of the nature of efficient computation and of its logical aspects.

Two projects in Computer Science and Informatics (PE6 panel) in the United Kingdom were awarded ERC Starting Grants in the 2022 round. The press releaseLink opens in a new window contains more information about the ERC funding programme.

Numerical simulations and visualizations developed by researchers from the High Performance and Scientific Computing (HPSC) group at Warwick’s Department of Computer Science in collaboration with Rolls-Royce, PPCU Hungary and Universities of Surrey and Birmingham has won the award for the best Visualization in the Scientific Visualization and Data Analytics Showcase at the 2022 Supercomputing (SC) Conference, held in Dallas TX. SC is the premier international conference on supercomputing providing a major forum for presenting the highest level of accomplishments in high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis. It is held annually in the US and attended by over 10000 attendees from all over the world.

Numerical simulations and visualizations developed by researchers from the High Performance and Scientific Computing (HPSC) group led by Dr. Gihan Mudalige at Warwick’s Department of Computer Science in collaboration with Rolls-Royce, PPCU Hungary and Universities of Surrey and Birmingham have been selected as one of the six finalists for the Scientific Visualization and Data Analytics Showcase at the 2022 Supercomputing (SC) Conference, held in Dallas TX. SC is the premier international conference on supercomputing providing a major forum for presenting the highest level of accomplishments in high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis. It is held annually in the US and attended by over 10000 attendees from all over the world. A video regarding the work can be found here.

We are delighted to announce that the paper "Dynamic Matching with Better-than-2 Approximation in Polylogarithmic Update Time", coauthored by Sayan Bhattacharya and Peter Kiss from the Theory and Foundations Research Division at Warwick, along with Thatchaphol Saranurak (University of Michigan) and David Wajc (Stanford University), has received the best paper award at SODA 2023.

Computing a maximum matching in a graph is a fundamental problem in combinatorial optimisation. The paper considers this problem in a dynamic graph, which keeps changing over time via a sequence of edge insertions and deletions. It was a decade-old open question to decide whether one can beat the performance guarantee of the simple greedy algorithm for this problem (which gives 2 approximation), in a dynamic setting. The paper answers this question in the affirmative, and provides the first efficient dynamic algorithm which can maintain a better-than 2 approximation to the size of the maximum matching in the input graph.

We are delighted to report that Dr Tom Gur (Warwick CS) and Dr Animesh Datta (Warwick Physics) have been awarded an EPSRC New Horizons on "Property Testing for Quantum Engineering". This project aims to bring together computer scientists and physicists towards the end of designing new approaches for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

From this Saturday (1 Oct to 5 Oct 2022), local residents of New Town, Kolkata, India will be able to use their mobile phones to vote for their favourite puja (a festival decoration for worshipping) as part of the annual Durga Puja festival celebration. New Town is a modern satellite city of Kolkata with about one million population. Durga Puja is one of the most important festivals in India, especially in Kolkata.

The online voting system implements a cryptographic protocol called DRE-ip, which was proposed by Dr Siamak Shahandashti and Professor Feng Hao in 2016 in an ERC-funded project. This protocol ensures that the e-voting system is end-to-end verifiable, hence giving every voter a chance to verify the tallying integrity of an election. The DRE-ip protocol was previously used in a Gateshead e-voting trial for polling station voting in 2019. This time it will be trialled for online voting, supported by a Royal Society international collaboration grant and University Policy Support Fund in collaboration with Professor Bimal Roy of the Indian Statistical Institute and the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA), West Bengel, India.

The online voting system has been developed by a group of 2021/2022 Master of Engineering (MEng) students (Horia Druliac, Matthew Bardsley, Chris Riches and Chris Dunn) in the Computer Science department as part of their MEng group project. The same group of students won the 2022 Innovation award.

Our teams from Warwick DCS have won both the 1st and 2nd place at the Zero Cost NAS Competition held in conjunction with the AutoML'22 conference.

Over the recent year, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has attracted a lot of attention. While being able to automate the discovery of better performing neural architectures than hand-crafted ones, it comes at a great price, requiring thousands of GPU hours to perform the search. The Zero Cost NAS competition challenges the participants to design efficient proxies for NAS, using negligible computational resources to evaluate neural architectures.

In collaboration with the AutoCAML team at Samsung AI Cambridge (led by Dr. Hongkai Wen), our research students, Lichuan Xiang and Youyang Sha, proposed new zero-cost NAS metrics that exploit the compressibility of neural networks. Our metrics are extremely efficient to run (reducing search cost from weeks/days to minutes), and achieves impressive results across multiple search spaces and datasets. In the competition, our teams won both the 1st and 2nd places (using different scoring functions), and the performance gap with the 3rd winning team is almost 2x. Checkout our poster here.