Computer Science News

PhD positions are available at the Theory and Foundations group in the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, UK. The group works on various aspects of theoretical computer science such as:

* automata and formal languages,
* logic and games,
* algorithmic game theory,
* online and dynamic algorithms,
* sublinear and streaming algorithms,
* parameterized complexity and structural graph theory,
* string algorithms,
* parallel algorithms,
* approximation algorithms,
* combinatorial and graph algorithms,
* random structures and randomized algorithms,
* computational complexity,
* privacy-preserving algorithms, cryptography and quantum computing.

The group has strong ties with the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP), established in 2007 jointly with Warwick Mathematics Institute and Warwick Business School. Together with DIMAP, the group is one of the leading theory groups in Europe, with regular publications in top international conferences and journals in theoretical computer science.

The Department of Computer Science at Warwick offers an excellent research environment. It was ranked 4th in the latest UK research assessment in Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2021. The University of Warwick is one of the founding members of the Alan Turing Institute.

The university campus is located on the border of two counties, West Midlands and Warwickshire, is about one hour train ride from London, and 15 minutes from Birmingham International Airport.

The applicants are expected to have a strong background in discrete mathematics, algorithms, or related topics with undergraduate and/or Master's degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, or related disciplines. The position(s) will be fully funded, and the successful applicant(s) will be receiving a stipend at rate in line with current Research Councils UK rates.

If you are interested in this opening, please send an email to either Dr Sayan Bhattacharya (S.Bhattacharya@warwick.ac.uk) or Dr Tom Gur (Tom.Gur@warwick.ac.uk), with a SINGLE .pdf file containing your CV and the names and email addresses of two references, by 4 November 2022. You are strongly encouraged to informally contact faculty members in the group you might want to work with prior to submitting your application.

Shortlisted candidates will be interviewed informally during the week of 14 November - 18 November, 2022.

List of faculty members in the group:

https://warwick.ac.uk/focs/people/<https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/research/focs/people/>

Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications:
https://warwick.ac.uk/dimap/<https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/dimap/>

We are delighted to report that Dr Tom Gur (Warwick CS) and Dr Animesh Datta (Warwick Physics) have been awarded an EPSRC New Horizons on "Property Testing for Quantum Engineering". This project aims to bring together computer scientists and physicists towards the end of designing new approaches for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

From this Saturday (1 Oct to 5 Oct 2022), local residents of New Town, Kolkata, India will be able to use their mobile phones to vote for their favourite puja (a festival decoration for worshipping) as part of the annual Durga Puja festival celebration. New Town is a modern satellite city of Kolkata with about one million population. Durga Puja is one of the most important festivals in India, especially in Kolkata.

The online voting system implements a cryptographic protocol called DRE-ip, which was proposed by Dr Siamak Shahandashti and Professor Feng Hao in 2016 in an ERC-funded project. This protocol ensures that the e-voting system is end-to-end verifiable, hence giving every voter a chance to verify the tallying integrity of an election. The DRE-ip protocol was previously used in a Gateshead e-voting trial for polling station voting in 2019. This time it will be trialled for online voting, supported by a Royal Society international collaboration grant and University Policy Support Fund in collaboration with Professor Bimal Roy of the Indian Statistical Institute and the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA), West Bengel, India.

The online voting system has been developed by a group of 2021/2022 Master of Engineering (MEng) students (Horia Druliac, Matthew Bardsley, Chris Riches and Chris Dunn) in the Computer Science department as part of their MEng group project. The same group of students won the 2022 Innovation award.

We're happy to announce that Shuichi Hirahara has joined the department as a Research Fellow.

Shuichi completed his PhD at the University of Tokyo in 2019. He is currently an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo.

Shuichi's primary research area is computational complexity theory. During his stay at Warwick, he will be involved in the activities of a joint project with the University of Oxford on the limits and possibilities of efficient algorithms.

We are happy to announce that Torsten Mütze (left in the picture), assistant professor in the Theory and Foundations Research Division, has won the Best Paper Award at the 47th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2022) for the paper "The Hamilton compression of highly symmetric graphs", authored jointly with his student Arturo Merino (TU Berlin; middle) and Petr Gregor (Charles University Prague; right). The paper proposes a new graph parameter that measures the amount of symmetry present in its Hamilton cycles, and it investigates this parameter for a wide range of interesting highly-symmetric graphs. It combines methods from combinatorics, number theory and algebra, and connects the new parameter to several related problems that researchers have studied intensively. The MFCS best paper award is sponsored by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.

Our teams from Warwick DCS have won both the 1st and 2nd place at the Zero Cost NAS Competition held in conjunction with the AutoML'22 conference.

Over the recent year, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has attracted a lot of attention. While being able to automate the discovery of better performing neural architectures than hand-crafted ones, it comes at a great price, requiring thousands of GPU hours to perform the search. The Zero Cost NAS competition challenges the participants to design efficient proxies for NAS, using negligible computational resources to evaluate neural architectures.

In collaboration with the AutoCAML team at Samsung AI Cambridge (led by Dr. Hongkai Wen), our research students, Lichuan Xiang and Youyang Sha, proposed new zero-cost NAS metrics that exploit the compressibility of neural networks. Our metrics are extremely efficient to run (reducing search cost from weeks/days to minutes), and achieves impressive results across multiple search spaces and datasets. In the competition, our teams won both the 1st and 2nd places (using different scoring functions), and the performance gap with the 3rd winning team is almost 2x. Checkout our poster here.

We welcomed back previous UG students on the 12th July for the Warwick Celebrates event. Thank you Ranko for your inspiring speech from the balcony!