Dr. Fayyaz Minhas (Fayyaz, pron. FAY-YAZ) has recently joined the department as an Assistant Professor. He will be associated with the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) lab in the Applied Computing division, and will also be working closely on the PathLAKE project.

Prior to joining Warwick, Dr. Minhas worked as a Principal Scientist at Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS), Islamabad, Pakistan since 2007. He has over 8 years of experience of teaching and research in computer science and has taught courses on Machine learning, Bioinformatics, Quantum Programming, Artificial Intelligence, Cancer Bioinformatics, Computational Biomolecular Design, Biometrics, Python Programming, etc. At PIEAS, he was the Principal Investigator of PIEAS Biomedical Informatics Lab as well as PIEAS Data Science Lab. Dr. Minhas is a recipient of the Fulbright scholarship for his Ph.D. in computer science at Colorado State University, USA. Dr. Minhas works on solving problems in biology and medicine using machine learning methods as well as the development of bespoke machine learning algorithms in the domains of biomedical informatics and data science.

At Warwick, Dr. Minhas will be working closely on the PathLAKE (Pathology image data Lake for Analytics, Knowledge and Education) project and is interested in exploring the development and application of machine learning models for integrating cancer pathology and bioinformatics data for improved diagnosis and personalised treatment of cancer.

He loves to work in a collaborative multidisciplinary research environment and keeps his office door open for colleagues, students and friends. He also likes to play volleyball, read poetry and is ever ready to talk about hiking trails in the American Midwest and the north of Pakistan.

Dr Minhas’ academic profile can be accessed at the URL: https://sites.google.com/view/fayyaz/home

The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor, Dr. Igor Carboni Oliveira, who will be associated with the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP).

Before joining Warwick, Igor held postdoctoral positions at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and at the School of Mathematics at Charles University in Prague, and was a research fellow at UC Berkeley's Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2015. He is also Royal Society University Research Fellow 2019.

His research is primarily focused on the limitations of algorithms and computations, with connections to combinatorics and mathematical logic. For more information about his work and interests, please see his web page at https://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~igorcarb/ 

We are happy to announce that Dr Yulia Timofeeva from the department's Applied Computing research theme has been awarded a Medical Research Council grant to develop a modelling framework and computational tools for studying synaptic transmitter release in health and disease. The £475K project will run in close collaboration with the laboratory of Professor Kirill Volynski at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology as well as other world-leading experimental laboratories in Europe, USA, Canada and Japan, specialising in state-of-the-art research in synaptic transmission.

We are pleased to report that Dr Sayan Bhattacharya from the Theory and Foundations research theme at the Computer Science Department has received an EPSRC New Investigator Award. This will allow him to lead a research project on the theory and applications of dynamic algorithms. The approximately £250K project will aim to develop new techniques to design algorithms for fundamental optimisation problems in a setting where the input data changes over time.

The proposal was ranked top at its funding prioritisation panel, and the reviewers said:

The intended research explorations are of very high quality and will likely make a substantial impact on the research community; and possibly on the industrial sector.

Making sure that our students have a high-quality experience in the department will be a top priority for Dr Sara Kalvala, Dr Ramanujan Sridharan and Adam Alcock. They will work with our students, the department's academic and professional services staff, and colleagues in the wider university to address issues, make improvements, and develop initiatives that will improve students' satisfaction and benefit their future careers.

We are happy to welcome to the department Dr Ian Saunders as a new Senior Teaching Fellow, and Dr Jonathan Foss and James Atkinson as new Teaching Fellows. In addition to all being accomplished scholars and teachers, Ian brings us a wealth of entrepreneurial experience, Jonny has expertise in working with industry in an interdisciplinary context, and James has recently won a prestigious Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence for Postgraduates who Teach. Professor Ranko Lazic, the head of department, has commented:

We are looking forward to the exciting enhancements that Ian, Jonny and James will be making to the department's teaching and learning, to the lasting benefit of our students.

We are pleased to report that members of the department's Theory and Foundations research theme have had 7 papers accepted to the 31st Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, January 5-8, 2020. SODA is the premier international conference on algorithms research, and the papers are:

• Parameterized Complexity and Approximability of Directed Odd Cycle Transversal by M. S. Ramanujan, Daniel Lokshtanov, Saket Saurabh, Meirav Zehavi
• An Improved Algorithm for Incremental Cycle Detection and Topological Ordering in Sparse Graphs by Sayan Bhattacharya, Janardhan Kulkarni
• Coarse-Grained Complexity for Dynamic Algorithms by Sayan Bhattacharya, Danupon Nanongkai, Thatchaphol Saranurak
• Combinatorial Generation via Permutation Languages by Elizabeth Hartung, Hung P. Hoang, Torsten Mütze, Aaron Williams
• On the Power of Relaxed Local Decoding Algorithms by Tom Gur, Oded Lachish
• Relaxed Locally Correctable Codes with Nearly-Linear Block Length and Constant Query Complexity by Alessandro Chiesa, Tom Gur, Igor Shinkar
• Sublinear time approximation of the cost of a metric k-nearest neighbor graph by Artur Czumaj, Christian Sohler