The department congratulates all 2022-2023 MSc students graduating in January 2024. Extra congratulations to the winners of the following MSc prizes:

Luisa F. Estrada Plata: Best dissertation in MSc Data Analytics & Best overall performance (MSc Data Analytics)

Aakash Chandnani: Best overall performance (MSc Computer Science)

Yijie Zhu: Best dissertation in MSc Computer Science

Weitong Liao: Best dissertation in MSc Computer Science

We are happy to announce four promotions in the department:

• Dr Charilaos Efthymiou has been promoted to Associate Professor
• Dr Igor Carboni Oliveira has been promoted to Associate Professor
• Dr Hongkai Wen has been promoted to Professor
• Dr Weiren Yu has been promoted to Associate Professor

Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!

On this recent article in the Quanta magazine, Alex Dixon, who wrote in Haskell the first solver for the problem, commented:

For the past 50 years, Vector Addition Systems—a simple but powerful computational model—have been a topic of great interest in theoretical CS. The reachability problem in that model asks whether we can get from some configuration to another.

The problem sounds relatively easy on a first glance, and an exponential lower bound held firm for over 40 years. Work by excellent theoreticians, including familiar names from Warwick DCS, finally closed the difficulty of the problem in 2021, concluding that it is very, very difficult indeed.