Dr Ranko Lazic has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the 2017/18 academic year, to work on the Petri nets reachability conjecture.

Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are one of the most prominent models of concurrency, and their study is a vibrant research area. They have been used to discover bugs and eliminate vulnerabilities in network protocols, concurrent software, business processes, hardware circuits, and control systems.

Professor Artur Czumaj, head of the Foundations of Computer Science research group, has commented:

This prestigious fellowship will further strengthen the internationally leading research in theoretical computer science at Warwick, which recently has been also greatly boosted by the new permanent appointments of Dr Sayan Bhattacharya and Dr Dmitry Chistikov.

The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor Dmitry Chistikov, who will be associated with the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP).

After obtaining his Candidate of Sciences (equivalent to PhD) degree at the Department of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Moscow State University, Dmitry was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, as wel as at the University of Oxford.

The general area of Dmitry's research is theoretical computer science. In particular, he is interested in theoretical foundations of verification: its algorithmic aspects (decision and counting problems) as well as combinatorial aspects (extremal properties and characteristics of mathematical models of computation).

For more information about Dmitry's research, please see his web page.

Dr Marcin Jurdzinski and Dr Ranko Lazic from Warwick's DIMAP inter-disciplinary centre and the Computer Science department, jointly with Dr Sven Schewe, Dr John Fearnley and Dr Dominik Wojtczak from the University of Liverpool, will lead a new research project on solving parity games in theory and practice, to run 2017-2020.

The project will be supported by approx. £750K from the EPSRC across the two sites. The proposal was ranked top at its funding prioritisation panel, and the reviewers said:

This is the strongest and best designed proposal on theoretical computer science I have seen in the last five years.

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The proposal is about fundamental research, but there is a clear path connecting the expected results to concrete industrial needs on program verification and program synthesis.

Professor Artur Czumaj, head of DIMAP and of the Theory and Foundations research division, commented:

This exciting new EPSRC project builds on excellence in theoretical computer science for which Warwick is internationally renowned. It strengthens our collaborative links with Computer Science at Liverpool, who were likewise one of the leading departments for research outputs in the most recent REF.