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.

We are delighted to report that Dr Sara Kalvala and Dr Ligang He have been promoted to Reader, effective from 1 June 2019. Quoting from their recommendations,

Dr Sara Kalvala is one of the most experienced academics in Computer Science, with extensive contributions to teaching (at all levels), research (in core computer science, interdisciplinary and recently in computer science education) and administration (in departmental, institutional and national settings). Sara has also been leading a range of outreach activities, as well as being one of the most collegiate members of the department.

and

Dr Ligang He has in recent years grown not only into one of the leaders of his wider research area in the department (high-performance systems), but also into a highly competent teaching innovator, with exemplary impact, outreach and engagement at the international level, as well as a reliable, industrious and forwards pushing colleague in the department. Among his other achievements is that Ligang has been successfully supervising a growing group of PhD students; he has graduated 5, and is currently supervising 7 PhDs.

it remains to say many congratulations!

The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor Dr. Tom Gur, who will be associated with the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP).

Before joining Warwick, Tom held a postdoctoral researcher position in the Theory Group at UC Berkeley (2017–2019). He obtained his PhD in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, under the guidance of Oded Goldreich, in 2017.