The department and DIMAP are delighted to welcome Sylvain Schmitz from LSV, ENS Cachan, CNRS and INRIA Saclay, who has joined us this week as Leverhulme Visiting Professor.

Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Dr Schmitz will spend 6 months at Warwick, collaborating with Dr Ranko Lazic and other colleagues on logics and games for algorithmic verification, and delivering three research lectures.

Dr Nathan Griffiths has been awarded a new EPSRC grant titled “JASPR: Justified Assessments of Service Provider Reputation”, which is to run jointly with KCL. JASPR aims to improve the way that services are discovered, selected and used by providing rich, personalised reputation assessments of services with the rationale behind those assessments. It is particularly targeted at giving small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) better exposure to large clients by reducing clients' reliance on extensive market histories or opaque online reviews that do not account for personalised needs.

Dr Ranko Lazic and Dr Marcin Jurdzinski have been awarded a research grant from the EPSRC for the next 2.5 years, entitled 'Counter Automata: Verification and Synthesis'. They will collaborate with Prof. James Worrell and Prof. Joel Ouaknine of the University of Oxford, to develop new automated procedures for analysing counter automata that will ultimately aid the design, modelling, verification, and analysis of complex computer systems. Commenting on the project, Dr Christoph Wintersteiger from Microsoft Research Ltd wrote that it 'has potential to significantly influence the next generation of Satisfiability Modulo Theories solvers [...] that in leading software industry today, are at the core of many advanced program analysis, testing and model-based development tools'.

EPSRC have recently funded a Warwick/York/Imperial £1M CCP Flagship project on "A radiation-hydrodynamics code for the UK laser-plasma community”. This project aims to provide large-scale software development for internationally leading computational science in laser plasma physics. This comes on the back of the new Centre for Computational Plasma Physics established by Prof Arber (Physics) and Prof Jarvis (Computer Science). This EPSRC project will fund a postdoc in the High Performance Computing Group for three years.

Professor Graham Cormode from the Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

The Wolfson Research Merit Award is one of the most prestigious UK awards, supported by the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science. The scheme provides up to 5 years’ funding after which the award holder continues with a permanent post at the host university. Jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the scheme aims to provide universities with additional support to enable them to attract science talent from overseas and retain respected UK scientists of outstanding achievement and potential. Professor Graham Cormode's research will focus on "Small summaries for big data".

The Wolfson Foundation is a grant-making charity established in 1955. Funding is given to support excellence and the focus of the award is a salary enhancement.

The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship of many of the world’s most distinguished scientists drawn from all areas of science, engineering, and medicine. The Society’s fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters of the 1660s, is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.

(See also The Royal Society announcement).

More information about Professor Graham Cormode's research is available at his web page at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/dcs/people/graham_cormode.