Computer Science News

Recent results on the official Unistats website show that of those Computer Science graduates from Warwick who have gained employment within 6 months following graduation, 100% are employed in professional or mangerial roles.

The Department of Computer Science at Warwick is in the top tier of computer science departments with respect to graduate employability. Known for its strong links with industry leaders in the technology, finance and consultancy sectors, the department is actively targeted by a range of top graduate employers, many of whom are involved with ongoing teaching and research activites at Warwick.

Rob will join the Department as a Professor associated with the Centre for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).

Rob is a computer scientist with a strong inter-disciplinary background, focusing on social informatics. In general terms, his research aims are to understand how cognitive, organisational and social factors shape processes of appropriation (design, development and adoption) of innovations in information and communication technologies (ICTs). Rob's particular interests are in: computer-supported, collaborative work; dependability of ICTs; social media and health informatics. Currently active areas of research include research infrastructures, tools and methods, studies of innovation in the NHS and methodologies for the co-development of assistive living technologies.

At Manchester University, Rob was Director of the Manchester eResearch Centre, a multi-disciplinary group working on innovative research infrastructures, tools and methods. He also leads the Analysing Social Media Collaboration (ASMC) a multidisciplinary group of researchers based at several UK universities. ASMC focuses on analysing data from social media platforms such as Twitter with the aim of understanding the role they play in social phenomena. ASMC conducted the analysis tweets sent during the August 2011 riots for the Guardian/LSE ‘Reading the Riots’ project. The group is now developing a Twitter analysis workbench.

Rob has been Principal or Co-Investigator on over 50 projects. He has published over 180 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference, is co-editor with Peter Halfpenny of ‘Innovations in Digital Research Methods’ to be published by Sage in 2013 and has been editor of the Health Informatics Journal since 2004.

For more information about Rob’s research please see his web page at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/Rob_Procter

Barclays Capital has sponsored a programming competition amongst our students, to help them learn about the intricacies of investment banking and the complexities of the software behind large, fast, and highly critical transactions underlying currency trading. The remit was to develop programs that emulated the real processing behind quantitative analytics, and create optimal trades by processing large, complex data.

Four students (Ruth, Kim, David and Donatas, pictured above) were awarded prizes both in cash as well an opportunity to attend the next Grace Hopper Conference for Women in Computing. Moreover, participants in the competition reported that they appreciated the chance to get a detailed look at the complex computing behind investment banking.

The Department is grateful to Barclays Capital for providing this opportunity.

Andrzej Murawski joined the Department in January 2013 as an Associate Professor. His doctoral degree is from the University of Oxford, where he was also a Junior Research Fellow (St John's College) and subsequently an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow. Before coming to Warwick he held a Lectureship at the University of Leicester.

Andrzej's research concerns the semantics of programming languages and its applications to program verification. In particular, he has extensive expertise in modelling logical systems and programming languages using games, an area known as game semantics.

Andrzej has served on program committees of international conferences such as FOSSACS, ICALP, LICS and POPL. He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College and Publicity Chair of LICS. His research has been supported by EPSRC, LMS and the Royal Society.

Andrzej teaches CS245 Automata and Formal Languages and CS246 Further Automata and Formal Languages in Term II.

For more information about Andrzej’s research please see his web page at http://warwick.ac.uk/amurawski/.

A recent workshop at Dagstuhl provided the opportunity for this photo of five generations of the PhD advisor relationship. From bottom to top we have Mike Paterson (Warwick), Leslie Valiant (Harvard), Mark Jerrum (Queen Mary College), Leslie Ann Goldberg (Liverpool) and Andreas Goebel (Liverpool).

The Telegraph shows that Warwick is the number one target for graduate recruitment by top employers.

'The Graduate Market in 2013' research reports that large, high profile UK employers are focusing on finding graduate recruits at a small handful of elite universities, headed by Warwick.

Professor Stephen Jarvis says:

"We are delighted with the news that Warwick is the most target university among the UK's top employers. The accolade highlight both the quality of Warwick students and the tremendous work done across the University to enhance the prospects and employability of our students. In Computer Science this kind of work is something that we view as integral to the future of our graduates, which is exactly why we pay so much attention to the academic standard and industrial relevance of all our courses."

The University has fared well in the past with a top ten placing in each of the previous five reports and leading the list for the first time is reflective of the investment being made in the future career paths of the students.

Two alumni form Warwick -James Gough (MEng) and Richard Warburton (MEng, PhD) were part of the London Java Community (LJC) team at the prestigious JavaOne 2012 Conference in San Fransisco. The LJC won two awards, the JCP Award and the Duke's Choice award. Both were given in recognition of the work of LJC on two projects: Adopt-a-JSR and Adopt-OpenJDK. Both projects are concerned with increasing the input of User Communities in the development of the Java language, and the prizes are a recognition of the increasing role of well-organized communities such as LJC in driving forward developments in the language.

James's blog entry provides more information on the event. Both James and Richard have taken advantage of their experience as students at Warwick and are actively involved in building a software develoment community in London. Congratulations to the LJC team!