Colleagues, friends, family and former students of Professor Roland Wilson gathered last Friday to celebrate his life and to inaugurate a bench in his memory. The bench is located outside the Department, surrounded by daisies at this time of year, overlooking the lake and the fountains.

Roland's son and daughter toured the Department and visited one of the research groups which is building on Roland’s intellectual legacy under the leadership of his former PhD student Nasir Rajpoot (now a Professor in the Department). Dr Abhir Bhalerao, also a former student and close colleague of Roland, said a few words about Roland's contribution to our community and his lasting importance to us. Head of Department Professor Yulia Timofeeva cut a ribbon on the bench before we all returned to the common room to share memories and anecdotes.

Although an emotional occasion for many of us, it was very nice to be able to gather together again after the restrictions of the last two years and to remember Roland and his legacy.

We are happy to announce that Dr Dmitry Chistikov has been promoted to Associate Professor from 1 April 2022. Since joining Warwick in 2017, Dmitry has made a significant contribution to the department with his research, teaching, and administrative and supportive roles. Many congratulations to Dmitry for all his achievements!

Members of the High-Performance and Scientific Computing Group (HPSC) at the department of Computer Science has won a best paper award at the 28th IEEE International Conference on High-Performance Computing, Data and Analytics held on the 17th-18th of December. The winning paper titled Predictive Analysis of Large-Scale Coupled CFD Simulations with the CPX Mini-App, develops a novel representative (mini-)application, specifically designed to model coupled execution of multi-physics numerical simulation codes from the CFD domain. The mini-coupler, CPX, is the first of its kind, combining multiple CFD mini-app instances to predict the run-time and scaling behaviour of large scale coupled CFD simulations, on modern multi-core and many-core clusters such as used for production turbomachinery design at Rolls-Royce plc. The work was carried out by PhD candidate, Archie Powell, in collaboration with Kabir Choudry, Arun Prabhakar, and Gihan Mudalige at the Department of CS Warwick, Dario Amirante (University of Surrey), Istvan Reguly (PPCU) and Stephen Jarvis (University of Birmingham).

The work was funded by the EPSRC Prosperity Partnership in Computational Science for Advanced Simulation and Modelling of Engineering Systems (AsiMoV) and Rolls-Royce plc.

Dr. Gihan Mudalige at the University of Warwick’s Department of Computer Science have been awarded an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) ExCALIBUR research grant as part of a consortium of researchers including the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC), universities of Warwick, Newcastle, Cambridge, Southampton and led by Imperial College London.

This 3 year, £2.6M project brings together communities from the UK Turbulence Consortium (UKTC) and the UK Consortium on Turbulent Reacting Flows (UKCRF) to ensure a smooth transition to exascale computing, with the aim to develop transformative techniques for advancing their production simulation software ecosystems dedicated to the study of turbulent flows. It is part of the ExCALIBUR (Exascale Computing ALgorithms and Infrastructures Benefiting UK Research) programme, aimed at delivering the next generation of high-performance simulation software for the highest-priority fields in UK research.

We are very pleased to welcome Alex Dixon, a new Teaching Fellow in our department.

Alex first joined the department in 2013, originally as an undergraduate student, and then as a postgraduate student studying automata theory. He has a keen interest in logic, automata, and functional programming.

We look forward to having him in the team!

We are delighted to report that Dr Ramanujan Sridharan (PI) from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) research theme at the Department of Computer Science and Professor Graham Cormode (Co-I, affiliated with FoCS) have been awarded an EPSRC Standard Research Grant, "New Horizons in Multivariate Preprocessing (MULTIPROCESS)".

This 4-year £540K project aims to advance the theory of preprocessing by designing novel multivariate preprocessing algorithms and extending their scope to high-impact big data paradigms such as streaming algorithms.

We are delighted to report that Dr Long Tran-Thanh has received a AIJ Prominent Paper Award for his first-authored paper, Efficient crowdsourcing of unknown experts using bounded multi-armed bandits, published in 2014 at Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), a premier journal in the field of artificial intelligence. The AIJ Prominent Paper Award recognises outstanding papers published in the journal in the last seven years that are exceptional in their significance and impact.

The paper developed the first comprehensive framework for the rigorous and principled mathematical analysis of task allocation algorithms in crowdsourcing systems. In addition, the paper proposed bounded bandits, a new sequential decision making model to solve task allocation problems with resource constraints. The work has had a significant impact on subsequent work carried out in both industry and academia. The award will be presented at IJCAI 2021, a top tier international conference in artificial intelligence.