We are delighted to report that Dr Tom Gur has been awarded a Future Leaders Fellowship on Foundations of classical and quantum verifiable computing, funded by £892K from UK Research and Innovation. Professor Artur Czumaj, the head of the department's Theory and Foundations research theme, has commented:

We congratulate Tom and look forward to hosting this exciting project that he will lead. This prestigious award confirms the high international standing of research at Warwick in theoretical computer science and its rich interfaces with other fields.

Tom’s Future Leaders Fellowship is concerned with algorithms and cryptographic protocols, both in the classical and quantum settings, and their applications to blockchain technology and delegation of computation to the cloud. This research programme is inherently interdisciplinary, involving fundamental research at the intersection of computer science, pure mathematics, and quantum physics.

The vision that this project aims to achieve is to develop new and exciting mathematical tools and to capitalise on their power to the end of pushing the frontiers of verifiable computing; providing new methodologies for meeting the challenges imposed by big data and the societal need for decentralised systems.

The contribution The Reachability Problem for Petri Nets is Not Elementary by Wojciech Czerwinski, Slawomir Lasota, Ranko Lazic, Jerome Leroux and Filip Mazowiecki has won a Best Paper Award at the 51st Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing, to be held on June 23-26, 2019 in Phoenix, AZ.

This work, which was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, shows that the central verification problem for Petri nets is much harder than has been known since the landmark result of Richard Lipton in 1976. Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are a long established model of concurrency with extensive applications in modelling and analysis of hardware, software and database systems, as well as chemical, biological and business processes.

Jeremias Knoblauch, a second year PhD student supervised by Dr. Theo Damoulas (Warwick CS & Stats), has been selected as the first graduate student based in the UK and as one of only 21 graduate students worldwide to receive the Facebook Fellowship award.