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Prof. Adi Shamir receives Honorary Doctorate from Warwick

Prof. Adi ShamirProf. Adi Shamir (Weizmann Institute of Science), the world-renowned cryptographer and a recipient of the ACM Turing Award 2002 (the highest honour in computer science received jointly with Prof. Ronald Rivest and Prof. Leonard M. Adleman), visited our campus in January 2023 to collect an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Warwick. During his visit, Prof. Shamir gave also a research talk at the DIMAP seminar and CS Colloquium entitled "Efficient Detection of High Probability Cryptanalytic Properties of Boolean Functions."

Prof. Paterson introducing Prof. Shamir in DIMAP seminarProf. Shamir has been known in Warwick since 1976, when he spent a year as a post-doc with our own Prof. Mike Paterson. Directly after Warwick Prof. Shamir went to MIT, where together with Adleman and Rivest he invented the famous RSA public-key cryptography algorithm for encoding and decoding messages, used nowadays by millions to securely transmit messages over the internet. The work on RSA has been immensely influential and led to the 2002 A.M. Turing Award for the three co-inventors, cited for the “ingenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice.” Other noticeable awards (for RSA and other numerous contributions to cryptography and computing) received by Prof. Shamir include the 2000 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, the Israel Mathematical Union Erdős Prize in Mathematics (1983), the Vatican Pontifical Academy PIUS XI Gold Medal (1992), the Association for Computing Machinery Paris Kannellakis Theory and Practice Award (1996), the Israel Prize in Computer Science (2008), and the Japan Prize in the field of electronics, information, and technology (2017), and the Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2018).


Complexity breakthrough by Dr Shuichi Hirahara

Dr Shuichi Hirahara, a research fellow affiliated with the Theory and FoundationsLink opens in a new window group and an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, has made a significant advance towards our understanding of the limits and possibilities of efficient computations. In his recent paper "NP-Hardness of Learning Programs and Partial MCSP", published at the 63rd IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2022), Dr Hirahara established the NP-hardness of learning efficient programs and of estimating the circuit complexity of an explicitly given partial Boolean function. The main result of the paper addresses a question that dates back to the pioneering work of Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin on the theory of NP-completeness from the 1970s.

The new result has been presented at several institutions, including UT Austin, Columbia University, Warwick (Online Complexity Seminar), MIT, and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley. The latter is running a semester-long program on "Meta-Complexity" that is closely related to Hirahara's recent contributions.

You can read more about it at the popular Computational Complexity Blog, where the discovery has been named "Complexity Result of the Year" (see also Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP).
Fri 03 Feb 2023, 17:36 | Tags: People Highlight Research Theory and Foundations

Outstanding MSc students

The department would like to congratulate our 2021-2022 MSc students on their end-of-year results. Additional congratulations go to the following outstanding students, who have been awarded academic prizes:

herbybowden.
  • Herby Bowen - best overall graduating MSc student in Computer Science
georgewright
  • George Wright - best MSc dissertation in Computer Science entitled "Countering Antimicrobial Resistance with Machine Learning"
kartikjain
  • Kartik Jain - best overall graduating MSc student in Data Analytics and best MSc dissertation in Data Analytics entitled "Football analytics: A novel approach to estimate success"
Thu 05 Jan 2023, 15:54 | Tags: People Courses Highlight Research Faculty of Science Teaching

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