Computer Science News

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!

Two researchers have joined the University of Warwick to tackle the challenges faced by cities in the 21^st century as part of the New York-based Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).

The University of Warwick is a member of a consortium, led by New York University, which is building a new applied science research institute in New York in response to a call issued by the city’s mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The University has now welcomed the first of a number of new academic staff to be appointed to work at CUSP, Dr Maria Liakata and Dr Weisi Guo.

More information is available in the press release

The University of Warwick Computer Science Department has entered into a partnership with high-performance computing firm Bull, which will sponsor two PhD students as well as support a Master of Engineering course in Computer Science.

The partnership brings together supercomputing expertise within both the Department of Computer Science at Warwick and Bull, and will see the two partners collaborate on a range of high-performance computing research and education initiatives.

Initially Bull will sponsor two PhD places within the department, each over a three-year period.

Bull will also provide support and sponsorship for a one-year Master of Engineering degree course in Computer Science. This will involve Bull running a regular technology-based project for students and a seminar series on emerging technologies in high-performance computing (HPC).

More details are available in the press release.