Leslie Valiant was awarded Honorary Doctor of Science today during the University of Warwick 2013 summer graduation ceremony.

Leslie Valiant was educated at King's College, Cambridge; Imperial College, London; and at the University of Warwick, where he received his PhD in computer science in 1974. He is currently T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1982. Before coming to Harvard he had taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Leeds University, and the University of Edinburgh.

His work has ranged over several areas of theoretical computer science, particularly complexity theory, learning, and parallel computation. He also has interests in computational neuroscience, evolution and artificial intelligence. Leslie is the author of two books, Circuits of the Mind, and Probably Approximately Correct.

He received the Nevanlinna Prize at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1986, the Knuth Award in 1997, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science EATCS Award in 2008, and the 2010 A. M. Turing Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

Graham Cormode has just joined the Department as a Professor associated with the Centre for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).

Graham completed his PhD at the University of Warwick in 2002. His postdoctoral work was at the DIMACS center in Rutgers University. Subsequently, he has worked as a researcher at Bell Labs, and AT&T Shannon Laboratories in New Jersey. His work considers aspects of managing and working with large amounts of data, with particular emphasis on privacy and anonymization, and large scale analytics. Dr. Cormode has published over 100 papers in international journals and refereed conferences. He is the recipient of two best paper awards. He has served on the program committees of numerous conferences, and is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and for ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

For more information about Graham’s research please see his web page at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/Graham_Cormode.

Computer Science student Kevin Street has been awarded a place on the prestigious Asidua Scholarship Programme. Launched in 2008, the programme - run by leading IT software services provider Asidua - aims to nurture fresh IT talent in the UK by supporting successful scholars with a package worth up to £25,000.

In addition to a paid bursary, the scholarship supplements the academic learning from university with real-life business experience through paid summer and year out placements, working with ICT professionals who are more than happy to share their knowledge and understanding.

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