Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today the next winner in the New York City Applied Sciences Initiative.

The Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) is an applied science research institute which will be a partnership of top institutions from around the globe, led by NYU and NYU-Poly with a consortium of world-class universities including The University of Warwick, Carnegie Mellon University, The City University of New York, The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and The University of Toronto. Industry partners include IBM, Cisco, Siemens, Con Edison, National Grid, Xerox, Arup, IDEO, and AECOM.

Warwick Computer Science will play a significant role in CUSP, with new and existing academics providing research and teaching in areas including operations research, service computing, complexity theory, networking and communications, data analytics, modelling and visualisation.

The completed institute will host 50 faculty and researchers and over 500 masters-level and PhD students. Students and staff from Warwick Computer Science will be able to engage in urban sciences projects in the New York ‘living lab’, in areas including smart buildings, digital healthcare, transport solutions, and public safety.

The Centre will open its doors to its first class of Warwick-CUSP students in September 2013.

For more information see:

1. http://www.nycedc.com/press-release/mayor-bloomberg-new-york-university-president-sexton-and-mta-chairman-lhota-announce
2. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/warwick_only_european/
3. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/04/urban-science-centre-born-in-the-big-apple.html

Julian Bhardwaj, a first year Discrete Mathematics student, has successfully made it through to the Grand Final of the Cyber Security Challenge which will be held in March. Julian actually qualified twice for the preceding final rounds through his performance in the SANS Packet Capture Analysis and the SANS/Sophos Penetrations Test competitions. His performance in the "Sophos’ Malware Hunt" final round placed in the top 11 candidates, competing against students and experienced IT professionals alike.

Julian has already won a year's subscription to the National Skills Academy for IT and there are more "career enabling" prizes on offer in the Grand Final which Julian is hoping will help him get into a future career in the computer security industry.

Julian is currently taking the module CS134, "Introduction to Computer Security" and wishes to continue to develop his knowledge of Computer Security throughout his degree course and possibly postgraduate study.

Recent results on the Unistats official website show that of those Computer Science graduates from Warwick, who have gained employment 6 months after graduation, 100% are in working in graduate level employment.

Warwick Computer Science is in the top tier of computer science departments (with four other universities) with respect to graduate employability. It is also the second most targeted by graduate employers for graduate recruitment programmes in the UK - second only to Cambridge.