Dr. Arun Prabhakar has joined the department to work as a Research Fellow on ASiMoV (Advanced Simulation and Modelling of Virtual Systems) in partnership with Rolls-Royce and a consortium of partners, including the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford and Bristol. He will be working with Professor Stephen Jarvis and Dr. Gihan Mudalige.

He received his BEng (Hons) and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nottingham. He was a recipient of the prestigious Dean's Excellence PhD Scholarship from the University of Nottingham. During the course of his research career he has published several papers and also won awards for his research work.

Before joining the University of Warwick, Dr. Arun worked as Research fellow in the Gas Turbine and Transmissions Research Centre(G2TRC) which hosts the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre in the University of Nottingham. During his time in G2TRC he has worked with a number of academics in the university and engineers from Rolls Royce in order to help them get an insight of the multi-phase and turbulent flows that arise in an aero-engine using Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD). Applications of his research at G2TRC included modelling the complicated two phase flow in various sections of the Aero-engine such as the gearbox and bearing chambers and also associated thin film flows.

The Department organised an off-campus induction event for the new PhD students in our Centre for Doctoral Training and Research. The agenda included presentations from academics on our large research projects, alongside short tutorials on theoretical computer science and advanced machine learning. There were also informal talks about PhD life, publishing high quality work, and pursuing a research career. The event concluded with a mini data dive using air quality data from London.

The two-day welcome event was held at Heythrop Park in Oxfordshire, which offered the students and academics the opportunity to meet each other in a relaxed environment. The students also met with some of the current PhD students and asked them about their experiences. The programme was very productive with overwhelmingly positive feedback.

We welcome our new cohort of PhD students and look forward to organising similar events across the coming years.

We are pleased to announce that the department has established a new partnership with the Samsung AI Research Centre at Cambridge (SAIC). The academic leading this collaboration, Dr Hongkai Wen, from the Artificial Intelligence and Data Science research themes, now works jointly at the University of Warwick and SAIC. The collaboration focuses on the area of efficient machine learning and on-device AI, which enables AI functions to be realised on devices themselves, without necessarily being connected to the cloud, offering more responsive, secure and privacy-preserving user experiences. It hoped that the research activities of this partnership will generate breakthroughs that can be integrated into millions of smartphones, televisions and home appliances.