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.

Our teams from Warwick DCS have won both the 1st and 2nd place at the Zero Cost NAS Competition held in conjunction with the AutoML'22 conference.

Over the recent year, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has attracted a lot of attention. While being able to automate the discovery of better performing neural architectures than hand-crafted ones, it comes at a great price, requiring thousands of GPU hours to perform the search. The Zero Cost NAS competition challenges the participants to design efficient proxies for NAS, using negligible computational resources to evaluate neural architectures.

In collaboration with the AutoCAML team at Samsung AI Cambridge (led by Dr. Hongkai Wen), our research students, Lichuan Xiang and Youyang Sha, proposed new zero-cost NAS metrics that exploit the compressibility of neural networks. Our metrics are extremely efficient to run (reducing search cost from weeks/days to minutes), and achieves impressive results across multiple search spaces and datasets. In the competition, our teams won both the 1st and 2nd places (using different scoring functions), and the performance gap with the 3rd winning team is almost 2x. Checkout our poster here.

On 23rd June 2022, Professor Feng Hao of the Systems and Security research theme was invited as one of the two expert witnesses to give oral evidence to the Fraud Act 2006 and Digital Fraud Committee appointed by the House of Lords at Parliament on trends of telephone frauds and the landscape of counter-fraud technologies. This is related to an ongoing EPSRC project, led by Professor Feng Hao (PI) from the Department of Computer Science and Dr Adrian von Mühlenen (co-I) from the Department of Psychology, the University of Warwick. In this project, the research team have been investigating a cost-effective solution to combat caller ID spoofing, a technique commonly used by fraudsters and scammers to pretend to call from trusted sources (e.g., banks, HMRC) as part of social engineering attacks. A transcript of the oral evidence session is published on the Parliament website.