The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the UK’s system for assessing the quality of research in the country's higher education institutions.

The results of the 2021 REF rank Warwick Computer Science 4th out of 90 UK computing departments. This cements our position as one of the top Computer Science departments in the UK, a position we have held for some time under different assessment methodologies.

Research Excellence at Warwick

Gunduz Vehbi Demirci has been awarded with the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine Post-Doctoral Research Prize 2022 for his paper jointly with Prof. Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu, "Partitioning sparse deep neural networks for scalable training and inference", published in the Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS '21) (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3447818.3460372).

Training large-scale deep learning models is notoriously difficult. Gunduz develops a highly parallel solution to scale training of sparse deep learning models, which is combined with a novel combinatorial optimisation built on a hypergraph partitioning model, reducing parallelisation overheads and achieving computational balance among processors. An end-to-end software solution is released, enabling competing with big tech companies that have access to large infrastructures and datasets.

The work is summarised in a paper accepted by the 2021 ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, which is a premier conference in high-end systems. The research output will have a great potential to bring significant practical impact in long term as developing such comprehensive solutions takes time and is typically achieved only within large groups.

Congratulations to Harita Dellaporta for receiving the Best Paper Award at the premier conference in Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2022 for her paper on Robust Bayesian Inference for Simulator-based Models via the MMD Posterior Bootstrap.