As a Residential Fellow of Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study, Dr Sylvain Schmitz is visiting the department 20-24 March 2017, for collaborative research with Dr Ranko Lazic and other members of DIMAP.

Schmitz (PhD University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis 2007) is an Assistant Professor at ENS Paris-Saclay and a permanent member of LSV, one of the top European research centres in logical aspects of computer science. In 2015, Schmitz was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Warwick. An author of over 40 articles in international journals and conferences, Schmitz's work has attracted over 500 citations, won best-paper awards, and been presented at several invited talks and European doctoral schools.

Dr Marcin Jurdzinski and Dr Ranko Lazic from Warwick's DIMAP inter-disciplinary centre and the Computer Science department, jointly with Dr Sven Schewe, Dr John Fearnley and Dr Dominik Wojtczak from the University of Liverpool, will lead a new research project on solving parity games in theory and practice, to run 2017-2020.

The project will be supported by approx. £750K from the EPSRC across the two sites. The proposal was ranked top at its funding prioritisation panel, and the reviewers said:

This is the strongest and best designed proposal on theoretical computer science I have seen in the last five years.

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The proposal is about fundamental research, but there is a clear path connecting the expected results to concrete industrial needs on program verification and program synthesis.

Professor Artur Czumaj, head of DIMAP and of the Theory and Foundations research division, commented:

This exciting new EPSRC project builds on excellence in theoretical computer science for which Warwick is internationally renowned. It strengthens our collaborative links with Computer Science at Liverpool, who were likewise one of the leading departments for research outputs in the most recent REF.

The Department of Computer Science celebrates two Faculty of Science Doctoral Thesis Prizes this year.

Dr Bo Gao’s research on energy-aware workload offloading for mobile environments investigates power-compute trade-offs for mobile and cloud computing platforms. This work has gained recognition from researchers in India, China, Malaysia, Italy, Australia, Pakistan, Germany, Canada and France, and has been cited by the US Army Research Laboratory.

Dr Philip Taylor’s research, in collaboration with Jaguar Land Rover, investigates data mining of vehicle telemetry data for driver monitoring, which is contributing to Warwick’s work with JLR on delivering safe and efficient autonomous and semi-autonomous cars of the future.

Congratulations to both candidates on their outstanding research.