Prof. Yulan He from the department's Data Science and Human-Centred Computing research themes has been awarded a 3-year EPSRC grant to develop a new framework to study model/data uncertainty and model interpretability of AI systems. The interdisciplinary project will assist system stakeholders and developers to understand and reason about the (business, personal, social, etc.) impact of intelligent systems on the world in which they operate, and to understand how and why decisions are taken. It will run in collaboration with Dr. Ritabrata Dutta from the Statistics Department, and Dr. Nelly Bencomo and Prof. Pete Sawyer from Aston University.

Professor Feng Hao (PI) from the Department of Computer Science and Dr Adrian von Mühlenen (co-I) from the Department of Psychology have been awarded an EPSRC grant on “End to End Authentication of Caller ID in Heterogeneous Telephony Systems”. This project will support a research fellow and a senior research fellow in computer science, each for four years, to explore new ways to stop caller ID spoofing without requiring globally trusted authorities, in collaboration with researchers from the Department of Psychology. This project will also aim to develop impacts by engaging with the telecommunication industry via the project partners: Huawei, Truecall, and RedTone.

The award of this project coincided with the announcement in March 2020 by the Federal Communications Commission (FFC), who proposed mandating the adoption of STIR/SHAKEN for all telecom providers in the US in order to stop the caller ID spoofing scams. However, STIR/SHAKEN requires globally trusted authorities, which have been known to be difficult to manage. As opposed to the top-down approach by the FCC, this EPSRC project aims to take a bottom-up approach to develop more effective and more deployable solutions without relying on any globally trusted third parties.

A University press release on this project can be found here.

We are pleased to report that members of the department's Theory and Foundations research theme have had 6 papers accepted to the 47th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, the main European conference in Theoretical Computer Science and annual meeting of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. The papers are:

• On the central levels problem by Petr Gregor, Ondřej Mička and Torsten Mütze
• Matrices of optimal tree-depth and row-invariant parameterized algorithm for integer programming by Timothy Chan, Jacob Cooper, Martin Koutecký, Dan Král and Kristýna Pekárková
• The Complexity of Verifying Loop-free Programs as Differentially Private by Marco Gaboardi, Kobbi Nissim and David Purser
• Rational subsets of Baumslag-Solitar groups by Michaël Cadilhac, Dmitry Chistikov and Georg Zetzsche
• The Strahler number of a parity game by Laure Daviaud, Marcin Jurdzinski and K. S. Thejaswini
• On the power of ordering in linear arithmetic theories by Dmitry Chistikov and Christoph Haase