Computer Science News
Faculty PhD Thesis Prize Awarded to Teddy Cunningham
We are pleased to announce that Dr Teddy Cunningham has been awarded a Faculty of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (SEM) PhD Thesis Prize. Each year, the SEM Faculty funds a prize for the best PhD/EngD thesis entered into the competition. Each department nominates a winner out of the applications received after a judging process as determined by the Faculty.
Teddy’s thesis is titled “Generating and Sharing Differentially Private Spatio-Temporal Data Using Real-World Knowledge”, and was supervised by Prof Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu. The thesis includes solutions for sharing trajectory data using local differential privacy, and incorporating constraints and relationships of data records into differential privacy that improves their utility while preserving the theoretical privacy guarantees. An example application is using road network information for improving the quality of privately shared location datasets.
Prof. Adi Shamir receives Honorary Doctorate from Warwick
Prof. 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. 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).
Outstanding MSc students
The department would like to congratulate our 2021-2022 MSc students on their end-of-year results. Additional congratulations go to the following outstanding students, who have been awarded academic prizes:
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New Head of Department
From 1 September 2021, the Department will be led by our new Head, Professor Yulia Timofeeva. On this occasion, Professor Lorenzo Frigerio, Vice Provost and Chair of the Faculty, said:
On behalf of the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine, I would like to express my thanks to Ranko for his outstanding service as HoD. I am delighted to welcome Yulia as new head of Computer Science, and wish her all the best with supporting the continued success of this department!
Graham Cormode named 2020 ACM Fellow
Prof. Graham Cormode of the Department of Computer Science has been named among the 2020 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellows, for contributions to computer science. The ACM is the world's leading learned society for computer science. Prof. Cormode is recognised for his contributions to data summarisation and privacy enabling data management and analysis. His work on data streams and sketching has been widely implemented in many high tech companies and organisations.
Dr Maria Liakata receives a Turing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Fellowship
We are please to report that Dr Maria Liakata has received a Turing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Fellowship.
The Fellowships from The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and AI, aim to attract and retain exceptional researchers in artificial intelligence. Covering a broad view of AI, including applications of foundational disciplines across mathematical sciences, statistical sciences, computational sciences and engineering, Fellows collaborate across disciplines and have the opportunity to collaborate with academia, industry, government and the third sector.
Dr Liakata’s Fellowship will focus on creating time sensitive sensors from language and heterogeneous user generated content. Commenting on the research she said:
“Wide spread use of digital technology has made it possible to obtain language data (e.g., social media, SMS) as well as heterogeneous data (e.g., mobile phone use, sensors) from users over time. Such data can provide useful behavioural cues both at the level of the individual and the wider population, enabling the creation of longitudinal digital phenotypes.
“Current methods in natural language processing (NLP) are not well suited to time sensitive, sparse and missing data, collected over time or personalised models of language use. The Turing AI fellowship will allow me to establish a new area in NLP on personalised longitudinal language processing.
“I plan to develop sensors for capturing digital biomarkers from language and heterogeneous user generated content to understand the evolution of an individual over time. I want to make a significant contribution to mental health by working with clinical experts to create new tools based on the sensors, making it possible to assess and measure conditions in between clinician appointments.”
To read more on this story, please click here.
Warwick and Alan Turing Institute partnership brings Data Science for Social Good Fellowship to the UK this summer
This year's Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) Fellowship programme is being held in the UK for the first time. The University of Warwick is hosting the Fellowships this summer in conjunction with the Alan Turing Institute. The 2019 programme is running from June 10 to August 28.
The Fellowship is a project-based training programme to supply data scientists with skills to create data-driven solutions to real-world problems. It trains aspiring data scientists to work on data mining, machine learning, big data and data science projects with social impact.
It was first pioneered by the University of Chicago, and since 2013 has seen more than 200 graduate and undergraduate students studying computer science, social sciences, statistics, public policy and other quantitative fields undertaking a DSSG Fellowship at the University of Chicago.
The Alan Turing Institute’s vision to advance research for public good and train the next generation of leaders is directly aligned with DSSG’s own goal to produce data scientists with strong skills in solving real-world problems.
Fellows work with non-profit and government partners around the world. To date, more than 60 projects have run, which have helped lots of organisations do more with their data, enhancing their services, interventions and outreach so that they can fulfil their mission of improving lives across the world.
Further details on the fellowship can be found here.