The EPSRC has recently announced funding for a new Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Urban Science, which will train scientists to harvest and process big data in order to develop a better understanding of the science of cities, and to apply that knowledge to find smart solutions to urban problems.

In just a few decades the world's population will exceed 9 billion, 70% of whom will live in cities. Enabling those cities to deliver services effectively, efficiently and sustainably, while keeping their citizens safe, healthy, prosperous and well informed, will be among the most important undertakings of this century” [UN Habitat].

This new CDT is led by Computer Science at Warwick, and involves partnership with the cities of New York and Birmingham. Several industry partners are backing the centre, including IBM, URS, AT&T, Cisco, E.ON and British Gas. The centre will support over 50 new PhD students over the next 5 years and each student will have the opportunity to work as part of a larger cohort, involving students from Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, University of Toronto and IIT Mumbai.

The CDT will provide EPSRC-funded PhD students with an unprecedented opportunity to work with industry experts and alongside our city officials on real-world urban science problems. Seldom have so many international academic institutions, leading businesses and city agencies been focused on one activity; seldom has the opportunity arisen to develop scientific solutions that will have direct impact on billions of the world’s population.” [Deputy Mayor New York City]

For more information about the centre, or enquiries about PhD opportunities, please contact Prof Stephen Jarvis.

Dr Victor Sanchez, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant from the Research Executive Agency of the EU to fund his research for the next four years. The Integration Grants assist researchers in integrating themselves in the EU with their own research budget. For the first call of 2013, more than 800 proposals from around the EU were submitted of which 22% received funding. Dr Sanchez research will focus on developing methods for storing and manipulating whole-slide images of pathology specimens, which are multi-gigapixel colour images of over 80k × 80k pixel resolutions. He will work in collaboration with the Computational Biology and Bioimaging (COMBI) group, and researchers from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and University of Arizona.

Congratulations to our staff member Dr Marcin Jurdziński, for winning the best paper award at the main European conference in Theoretical Computer Science ICALP 2013 (Track B), for the paper Reachability in Two-Clock Timed Automata is PSPACE-complete he co-authored with Dr John Fearnley (a Warwick PhD, currently at the University of Liverpool).

John and Marcin's paper is one of six Warwick papers accepted for presentation at ICALP. Moreover, two of the 2007 Warwick BSc Computer Science graduates have papers at ICALP 2013 (John Fearnley and Dominic Orchard). Congratulations are in place for all Warwick authors at ICALP!