We are pleased to report that Dr Sayan Bhattacharya from the Theory and Foundations research theme at the Computer Science Department has received an EPSRC New Investigator Award. This will allow him to lead a research project on the theory and applications of dynamic algorithms. The approximately £250K project will aim to develop new techniques to design algorithms for fundamental optimisation problems in a setting where the input data changes over time.

The proposal was ranked top at its funding prioritisation panel, and the reviewers said:

The intended research explorations are of very high quality and will likely make a substantial impact on the research community; and possibly on the industrial sector.

We are pleased to report that members of the department's Theory and Foundations research theme have had 7 papers accepted to the 31st Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, January 5-8, 2020. SODA is the premier international conference on algorithms research, and the papers are:

• Parameterized Complexity and Approximability of Directed Odd Cycle Transversal by M. S. Ramanujan, Daniel Lokshtanov, Saket Saurabh, Meirav Zehavi
• An Improved Algorithm for Incremental Cycle Detection and Topological Ordering in Sparse Graphs by Sayan Bhattacharya, Janardhan Kulkarni
• Coarse-Grained Complexity for Dynamic Algorithms by Sayan Bhattacharya, Danupon Nanongkai, Thatchaphol Saranurak
• Combinatorial Generation via Permutation Languages by Elizabeth Hartung, Hung P. Hoang, Torsten Mütze, Aaron Williams
• On the Power of Relaxed Local Decoding Algorithms by Tom Gur, Oded Lachish
• Relaxed Locally Correctable Codes with Nearly-Linear Block Length and Constant Query Complexity by Alessandro Chiesa, Tom Gur, Igor Shinkar
• Sublinear time approximation of the cost of a metric k-nearest neighbor graph by Artur Czumaj, Christian Sohler

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.