Artificial Intelligence News

From this Saturday (1 Oct to 5 Oct 2022), local residents of New Town, Kolkata, India will be able to use their mobile phones to vote for their favourite puja (a festival decoration for worshipping) as part of the annual Durga Puja festival celebration. New Town is a modern satellite city of Kolkata with about one million population. Durga Puja is one of the most important festivals in India, especially in Kolkata.

The online voting system implements a cryptographic protocol called DRE-ip, which was proposed by Dr Siamak Shahandashti and Professor Feng Hao in 2016 in an ERC-funded project. This protocol ensures that the e-voting system is end-to-end verifiable, hence giving every voter a chance to verify the tallying integrity of an election. The DRE-ip protocol was previously used in a Gateshead e-voting trial for polling station voting in 2019. This time it will be trialled for online voting, supported by a Royal Society international collaboration grant and University Policy Support Fund in collaboration with Professor Bimal Roy of the Indian Statistical Institute and the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA), West Bengel, India.

The online voting system has been developed by a group of 2021/2022 Master of Engineering (MEng) students (Horia Druliac, Matthew Bardsley, Chris Riches and Chris Dunn) in the Computer Science department as part of their MEng group project. The same group of students won the 2022 Innovation award.

We're happy to announce that Shuichi Hirahara has joined the department as a Research Fellow.

Shuichi completed his PhD at the University of Tokyo in 2019. He is currently an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo.

Shuichi's primary research area is computational complexity theory. During his stay at Warwick, he will be involved in the activities of a joint project with the University of Oxford on the limits and possibilities of efficient algorithms.

We are happy to announce that Torsten Mütze (left in the picture), assistant professor in the Theory and Foundations Research Division, has won the Best Paper Award at the 47th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2022) for the paper "The Hamilton compression of highly symmetric graphs", authored jointly with his student Arturo Merino (TU Berlin; middle) and Petr Gregor (Charles University Prague; right). The paper proposes a new graph parameter that measures the amount of symmetry present in its Hamilton cycles, and it investigates this parameter for a wide range of interesting highly-symmetric graphs. It combines methods from combinatorics, number theory and algebra, and connects the new parameter to several related problems that researchers have studied intensively. The MFCS best paper award is sponsored by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.