Computer Science News

Graham Cormode has just joined the Department as a Professor associated with the Centre for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).

Graham completed his PhD at the University of Warwick in 2002. His postdoctoral work was at the DIMACS center in Rutgers University. Subsequently, he has worked as a researcher at Bell Labs, and AT&T Shannon Laboratories in New Jersey. His work considers aspects of managing and working with large amounts of data, with particular emphasis on privacy and anonymization, and large scale analytics. Dr. Cormode has published over 100 papers in international journals and refereed conferences. He is the recipient of two best paper awards. He has served on the program committees of numerous conferences, and is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and for ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

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

Computer Science student Kevin Street has been awarded a place on the prestigious Asidua Scholarship Programme. Launched in 2008, the programme - run by leading IT software services provider Asidua - aims to nurture fresh IT talent in the UK by supporting successful scholars with a package worth up to £25,000.

In addition to a paid bursary, the scholarship supplements the academic learning from university with real-life business experience through paid summer and year out placements, working with ICT professionals who are more than happy to share their knowledge and understanding.

Full story on insite

Congratulations to our staff member Dr Marcin Jurdziński, for winning the best paper award at the main European conference in Theoretical Computer Science ICALP 2013 (Track B), for the paper Reachability in Two-Clock Timed Automata is PSPACE-complete he co-authored with Dr John Fearnley (a Warwick PhD, currently at the University of Liverpool).

John and Marcin's paper is one of six Warwick papers accepted for presentation at ICALP. Moreover, two of the 2007 Warwick BSc Computer Science graduates have papers at ICALP 2013 (John Fearnley and Dominic Orchard). Congratulations are in place for all Warwick authors at ICALP!

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Warwick's School of Life Sciences, Centre for Systems Biology and the Department of Computer Science have discovered hundreds of regions in plant DNA that have been preserved across different species through 100 million years of evolution. These regions are not part of any genes, but may be responsible for turning individual genes "on" and "off". The discovery will help biologists to understand better the genetics of plants, leading to potential applications in agriculture and food security. This research has been made possible by a computational analysis of the DNA in several plant species, based on algorithms developed by a DCS academic Dr Alexander Tiskin and his former PhD student Dr Peter Krusche (now working at Warwick's Centre for Systems Biology). The research was published in the journal Plant Cell.

Warwick University's press release

Interview with the team's leader Dr Sascha Ott

Dr Mike Joy has been awarded 'Best Personal Tutor' in the STARS of Warwick awards. The student-led teaching awards recognise and celebrate staff members who have gone the extra mile for the benefit of students.

The Awards were launched in 2012 and are run by students, nominated by students and judged by students. From choosing categories to nominating and presenting awards, STARS is a completely student-led scheme giving students the chance to reward staff they feel have gone above and beyond for the sake of their students.

Full list of winners.

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