We are happy to announce that Dr Ayse Saliha Sunar has joined the Department of Computer Science as a Teaching Fellow. She completed her Master's degree on Intelligent Tutoring Systems at Nagoya University and her PhD on Big Educational Data Analysis and Recommender Systems at the University of Southampton.

She then gained experience in teaching in Turkey and in research collaboration, including European project proposals in Slovenia on integrating cutting-edge technologies into educational and other social contexts. Her current research interests include technology-enhanced learning to improve teachers' and faculties' pedagogical skills, as well as applications of natural language processing in classrooms and hybrid teaching models.

We welcome her to the department!

We are delighted to announce that Peter Kiss, a PhD student in the Theory and Foundations Research Division, has received the best student paper award at European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA) 2023, for his joint work with Joakim Bilkstad for the paper: "Incremental (1-eps)-approximate dynamic matching in O(poly(1/eps)) update time". The paper considers the problem of maintaining a large matching in a graph that is undergoing a sequence of edge insertions. They present an algorithm for this fundamental problem in dynamic graph algorithms, which has near-optimal approximation ratio and an update time that does not grow at all with the size of the input and is also polynomial in 1/\eps (the error parameter). In addition, their approach is simpler than previous algorithms on the same problem that achieved weaker guarantees.

Edgaras Purauskas, Technician in the Department of Computer Science received the Warwick Technician Commitment Award for Outstanding Achievement. Edgaras was one of two recipients of these inaugural awards, which received over 40 nominations campus wide. Edgaras had a number of nominations for his "consistently exceptional work" and his "deep understanding of computer systems, software, and hardware". Many congratulations Edgaras and thank you for your extraordinary efforts!