Eight papers authored by Computer Science researchers from Warwick have been accepted for publication at the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, the leading international venue for machine learning research, which will be held on 10-15 December 2024 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada:

• Generating Origin-Destination Matrices in Neural Spatial Interaction Models, by Ioannis Zachos, Mark Girolami, and Theodoros Damoulas
• Interventionally Consistent Surrogates for Complex Simulation Models, by Joel Dyer, Nicholas Bishop, Yorgos Felekis, Fabio Massimo Zennaro, Ani Calinescu, Theodoros Damoulas, and Michael Wooldridge
• Learning the Expected Core of Strictly Convex Stochastic Cooperative Games, by Phuong Nam Tran, The Anh Ta, Shuqing Shi, Debmalya Mandal, Yali Du, and Long Tran-Thanh
• Physics-Informed Variational State-Space Gaussian Processes, by Oliver Hamelijnck, Arno Solin, and Theodoros Damoulas
• SARAD: Spatial Association-Aware Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis for Multivariate Time Series, by Zhihao Dai, Ligang He, Shuanghua Yang, and Matthew Leeke
• Symmetric Linear Bandits with Hidden Symmetry, by Phuong Nam Tran, The Anh Ta, Debmalya Mandal, and Long Tran-Thanh
• The Effectiveness of Surprisingly Popular Voting with Partial Preferences, by Hadi Hosseini, Debmalya Mandal, and Amrit Puhan
• What makes unlearning hard and what to do about it, by Kairan Zhao, Meghdad Kurmanji, George-Octavian Bărbulescu, Eleni Triantafillou, and Peter Triantafillou

The work of Professor Graham Cormode has been recognized with a “test of time” award. The ACM SIGMOD conference presents an award each year for the paper from SIGMOD 10-12 years previously that has had the biggest impact, and passed the “test-of-time”. The 2014 paper “PrivBayes: private data release via bayesian networks” (Jun Zhang, Graham Cormode, Cecilia M. Procopiuc, Divesh Srivastava, Xiaokui Xiao) was selected for this honour. The award will be presented at the 2024 ACM SIGMOD Conference in Santiago.

Toby Flynn, PhD student in the department's High-Performance and Scientific Computing group, supervised by Prof. Gihan Mudalige together with Dr. Robert Manson-Sawko at IBM Research UK received the best paper award at the 38th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2024) last week in San Francisco US. IPDPS is one of the most prominent and high ranking conferences in parallel and distributed computing, now in its 38th year.

The paper titled "Performance-Portable Multiphase Flow Solutions with Discontinuous Galerkin Methods", details the development of a new performance portable solver workflow using Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for developing multiphase flow simulations based on the OP2 domain-specific language. Results demonstrate scaling on both CPU and GPU systems including UK's national supercomputer, ARCHER2 at EPCC Edinburgh and the European Petascale Supercomputer, LUMI hosted by CSC Finland. The work is a collaboration with IBM Research UK supported by an iCASE award funded jointly by IBM and EPSRC.

The paper pre-print is available here.

Seven papers authored by Computer Science researchers from Warwick have been accepted for publication at the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, one of the top three global venues for machine learning research, which will be held on 21-27 July 2024 in Vienna, Austria:

• Agent-Specific Effects: A Causal Effect Propagation Analysis in Multi-Agent MDPs, by Stelios Triantafyllou, Aleksa Sukovic, Debmalya Mandal, and Goran Radanovic
• Dynamic Facility Location in High Dimensional Euclidean Spaces, by Sayan Bhattacharya, Gramoz Goranci, Shaofeng Jiang, Yi Qian, and Yubo Zhang (Accepted as a spotlight, among the top 13 percent of all accepted papers)
• High-Dimensional Kernel Methods under Covariate Shift: Data-Dependent Implicit Regularization, by Yihang Chen, Fanghui Liu, Taiji Suzuki, and Volkan Cevher
• Revisiting character-level adversarial attacks, by Elias Abad Rocamora, Yongtao Wu, Fanghui Liu, Grigorios Chrysos, and Volkan Cevher
• Reward Model Learning vs. Direct Policy Optimization: A Comparative Analysis of Learning from Human Preferences, by Andi Nika, Debmalya Mandal, Parameswaran Kamalaruban, Georgios Tzannetos, Goran Radanovic, and Adish Singla
• To Each (Textual Sequence) Its Own: Improving Memorized-Data Unlearning in Large Language Models, by George-Octavian Bărbulescu and Peter Triantafillou
• Towards Neural Architecture Search through Hierarchical Generative Modeling, by Lichuan Xiang, Łukasz Dudziak, Mohamed Abdelfattah, Abhinav Mehrotra, Nicholas Lane, and Hongkai Wen

As part of a 2021/2022 MEng group project, Horia Druliac, Matthew Bardsley, Chris Riches, and Christian Dunn implemented a fully functional end-to-end (E2E) verifiable online voting system and conducted a successful trial among the residents of New Town in Kolkata, India during the 2022 Durga Puja festival celebration. This was the first time an E2E online voting system was built and tested in India. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Full details about the implementation, the trial and the voter feedback are written in a paper, published in the Journal of Information Security and Application. A free version of the paper is available on IACR e-print as a technical report. Also, see the earlier news item about this Durga Puja trial.

Professor Feng Hao, who supervised this group project, commented: “This is great teamwork. The four MEng students worked relentlessly for nearly a year, with good assistance from Luke Harrison and Professor Bimal Roy. The e-voting system was developed at an industry standard and worked flawlessly during the Durga Puja trial. Several government officials from India also helped us, providing invaluable support for the trial. We sincerely thank them in the acknowledgement section of the paper.”

We are happy to announce four promotions in the department:

• Dr Charilaos Efthymiou has been promoted to Associate Professor
• Dr Igor Carboni Oliveira has been promoted to Associate Professor
• Dr Hongkai Wen has been promoted to Professor
• Dr Weiren Yu has been promoted to Associate Professor

Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!

Seven papers authored by Computer Science researchers from Warwick have been accepted for publication at the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, the leading international venue for machine learning research, which will be held on 10-16 December 2023 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA:

• EV-Eye: Rethinking High-frequency Eye Tracking through the Lenses of Event Cameras, by Guangrong Zhao, Yurun Yang, Jingwei Liu, Ning Chen, Yiran Shen, Hongkai Wen, and Guohao Lan
• Fully Dynamic k-Clustering in Õ(k) Update Time, by Sayan Bhattacharya, Martin Costa, Silvio Lattanzi, and Nikos Parotsidis
• Initialization Matters: Privacy-Utility Analysis of Overparameterized Neural Networks, by Jiayuan Ye, Zhenyu Zhu, Fanghui Liu, Reza Shokri, and Volkan Cevher
• Learning a Neuron by a Shallow ReLU Network: Dynamics and Implicit Bias for Correlated Inputs, by Dmitry Chistikov, Matthias Englert, and Ranko Lazic
• On the Convergence of Shallow Transformers, by Yongtao Wu, Fanghui Liu, Grigorios Chrysos, and Volkan Cevher
• Towards Data-Agnostic Pruning At Initialization: What Makes a Good Sparse Mask? by Hoang Pham, The Anh Ta, Shiwei Liu, Lichuan Xiang, Dung Le, Hongkai Wen, and Long Tran-Thanh
• Towards Unbounded Machine Unlearning, by Meghdad Kurmanji, Peter Triantafillou, and Eleni Triantafillou