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5 papers accepted to FOCS 2023

IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science 2023

Five papers from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) have been accepted to the 64th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2023), the IEEE flagship conference in theoretical computer science that will be held on November 6 - 9, 2023 in Santa Cruz, California, USA:

Thu 20 Jul 2023, 02:14 | Tags: Research Theory and Foundations

Best Paper Award and 5 papers at the 50th ICALP conference

Henry Sinclair-BanksHenry Sinclair-Banks, a PhD student in the the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP), has won a Best Paper Award at ICALP 2023, the 50th EATCS International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP is the main conference and annual meeting of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS).

Henry's paper, co-authored with researchers from Germany and Poland: Marvin Künnemann, Filip Mazowiecki, Lia Schütze, and Karol Węgrzycki, addresses the coverability problem in vector addition systems (VASS), a well-known model of concurrent systems. Coverability is an algorithmic problem for the verification of "safety properties": whether the system always avoids a set of bad states. Henry and his co-authors determine how much time is required to solve this problem in the worst case. They develop an algorithm that improves upon the state of the art that has stood for forty years. They also prove that, in several settings, it is impossible to decide coverability substantially faster, unless there is also a faster algorithm for a classic problem such as Boolean satisfiability (SAT) and finding cycles of fixed length in graphs.

ICALP In total, 5 Warwick papers will appear at this year's ICALP: EATCS logo

This July's ICALP will be the 50th edition of the conference.

Fri 02 Jun 2023, 14:11 | Tags: Research Theory and Foundations

Latest academic promotions

We are happy to announce five promotions in the department, with effect from 1st August 2023.

  • Dr James Archbold has been promoted to Associate Professor (Teaching Focussed)
  • Dr Richard Kirk has been promoted to Assistant Professor (Teaching Focussed)
  • Dr Claire Rocks has been promoted to Reader (Teaching Focussed)
  • Dr Ian Saunders has been promoted to Associate Professor (Teaching Focussed)
  • Dr Sathya Subramanian has been promoted to Assistant Professor (Research Focussed)

Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!


Promotion to Assistant Professor

We are happy to share the news that Dr Alex Dixon has been promoted to the position of Assistant Professor, effective from 1 May 2023. Alex joined our department as a Teaching Fellow in September 2021, while still completing his PhD research. Despite juggling both roles, he has made significant contributions to the department's activities. Many congratulations to Alex for his accomplishments in completing his PhD research and for earning this well-deserved promotion.

Tue 09 May 2023, 09:00 | Tags: People Highlight Theory and Foundations

Cambridge-Oxford-Warwick Quantum Computing Project

An EPSRC Robust and Reliable Quantum Computing Grant will be awarded to Anuj Dawar (Cambridge), Tom Gur (Warwick), Tom Melham (Oxford), and Sergii Strelchuk (Cambridge). The project sets out to explore the role of symmetry and structure in quantum computation, with applications to classical verification and simulation of quantum computation.

In addition, the project aims to strengthen and create new connections and collaborations between Cambridge, Oxford, and Warwick in the field of Quantum Computing (building on existing initiatives such as the Cambridge-Warwick Quantum Colloquium) and establish new partnerships with Warwick Quantum.

Tue 28 Feb 2023, 13:54 | Tags: Grants Theory and Foundations

5+ papers accepted to STOC 2023

ACM logoSTOC logo SIGACT logo

Several papers from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) have been accepted to the 55th ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2023), the ACM flagship conference in theoretical computer science that will be held on June 20-23, 2023 in Orlando, Florida, USA:

Further, there are two more accepted papers autored by Shuichi Hirahara, who was affiliated with the department and the FoCS group during the submission time, in Autumn 2022:

  • "Capturing one-way functions via NP-hardness of meta-complexity" by Shuichi Hirahara.
  • "Hardness self-amplification: Simplified, optimized, and unified" by Shuichi Hirahara and Nobutaka Shimizu.
Sun 19 Feb 2023, 12:18 | Tags: Research Theory and Foundations

Prof. Adi Shamir receives Honorary Doctorate from Warwick

Prof. Adi ShamirProf. Adi Shamir (Weizmann Institute of Science), the world-renowned cryptographer and a recipient of the ACM Turing Award 2002 (the highest honour in computer science received jointly with Prof. Ronald Rivest and Prof. Leonard M. Adleman), visited our campus in January 2023 to collect an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Warwick. During his visit, Prof. Shamir gave also a research talk at the DIMAP seminar and CS Colloquium entitled "Efficient Detection of High Probability Cryptanalytic Properties of Boolean Functions."

Prof. Paterson introducing Prof. Shamir in DIMAP seminarProf. Shamir has been known in Warwick since 1976, when he spent a year as a post-doc with our own Prof. Mike Paterson. Directly after Warwick Prof. Shamir went to MIT, where together with Adleman and Rivest he invented the famous RSA public-key cryptography algorithm for encoding and decoding messages, used nowadays by millions to securely transmit messages over the internet. The work on RSA has been immensely influential and led to the 2002 A.M. Turing Award for the three co-inventors, cited for the “ingenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice.” Other noticeable awards (for RSA and other numerous contributions to cryptography and computing) received by Prof. Shamir include the 2000 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, the Israel Mathematical Union Erdős Prize in Mathematics (1983), the Vatican Pontifical Academy PIUS XI Gold Medal (1992), the Association for Computing Machinery Paris Kannellakis Theory and Practice Award (1996), the Israel Prize in Computer Science (2008), and the Japan Prize in the field of electronics, information, and technology (2017), and the Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2018).


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