Researchers from the Systems and Security theme, Department of Computer Science have created a new spin-out company, SEEV Technologies Ltd, to build end-to-end (E2E) verifiable e-voting systems for future elections. An E2E verifiable voting system allows every voter to verify that their vote is properly cast-as-intended, recorded-as-cast and tallied-as-recorded while preserving the voter's privacy. SEEV (self-enforcing e-voting) is a new paradigm of E2E voting technology that enables voters to fully verify the tallying integrity of an election without needing any trustworthy tallying authority, hence the system is "self-enforcing".

This joint spin-out from the University of Warwick and Newcastle University is built on an ERC-funded starting grant ("Self-Enforcing E-Voting System: Trustworthy Election in Presence of Corrupt Authorities", No. 306994, PI: Professor Feng Hao) initially hosted at Newcastle University and later transferred to the University of Warwick. The company is co-founded by Professor Feng Hao and Dr Siamak Shandahshti (co-inventors), and led by Dr Stewart Hefferman (CEO). SEEV has been prototyped and successfully tested in several trials in the past, supported by an ERC Proof of Concept grant (No. 677124), a Royal Society International collaboration award (CA\R1\180226), and an Innovate UK Cybersecurity Academic Startup Accelerator Programme (CASAP). SEEV Technologies Ltd has received seed funding from Oxford-based Global Initiative to build SEEV systems for real-world elections.

A University of Warwick press release is here.

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!

Five papers from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) have been accepted to the 64th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2023), the IEEE flagship conference in theoretical computer science that will be held on November 6 - 9, 2023 in Santa Cruz, California, USA:

• "Chasing positive bodies" by Sayan Bhattacharya, Niv Buchbinder, Roie Levin, and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
• "Dynamic (1+epsilon)-approximate matching size in truly sublinear update time" by Sayan Bhattacharya, Peter Kiss, and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
• "Polynomial-time pseudodeterministic construction of primes" by Lijie Chen, Zhenjian Lu, Igor C. Oliveira, Hanlin Ren, and Rahul Santhanam.
• "Approximating edit distance in the fully dynamic model" by Tomasz Kociumaka, Anish Mukherjee, and Barna Saha.
• "Traversing combinatorial 0/1-polytopes via optimization" by Arturo Merino and Torsten Mütze.