We are delighted to report that Dr Josiah Lutton and Dr Pavel Veselý, Research Fellows from the Department of Computer Science, have been named joint winners of a SEM Faculty Post Doctoral Prize.

Each year, the University of Warwick's Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine (SEM) funds a prize for the best Warwick-affiliated research output from an Early Career Researcher. Each department nominates a winner, or joint winners, out of the applications received after a judging process as determined by the Faculty.

Professor Yulan He, who led the Department's selection, commented:

Pavel's paper on quantile summary, co-authored with Professor Graham Cormode, was published in a top-tier conference on theoretical databases, Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) co-located with SIGMOD. The tight lower bound for quantile summaries proposed in this work is a deep theoretical exploration central to data management. The work led to a collaboration with Splunk, a US-based company that focuses on processing machine-generated big data. The follow-up paper has been accepted to the 2021 edition of the PODS conference. The result has a great potential for a broader impact. Josiah's work is on medical imaging. Together with Dr Sharon Collier and Professor Till Bretschneider, they proposed an enhanced 3D segmentation method (with a curvature-based enhancement term), which outperforms the best-of-breed random walker method in Dictyostelium image volumes. The work was published in a top journal, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, with an impact factor of 6.68. Josiah presented his method at the Actin 2020 meeting and was awarded a prize for best imaging in a talk by the Royal Microscopical Society and has been featured in an article in their inFocus magazine.

We are pleased to report that Dr Matthew Leeke, Reader at the Department of Computer Science, has been recognised as part of the Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence (WATE) 2020-21. WATE seeks to recognise outstanding teaching and support of learning across the University. This year the awards celebrated stories of everyday excellence in challenging times, and worked to plant the seeds for future approaches to teaching and learning.

Dr Matthew Leeke said regarding his award:

I'm hugely grateful to our students for the nomination. I feel fortunate to be recognised but even more fortunate to work with such talented and thoughtful people. I'd also like to thank my colleagues for their support. So much of what we do in academia goes unseen, making it important to remember that any success is always a team effort. The module tutors I worked with this year are a great example. Archie, Kabir and Vasan went well above-and-beyond in exceptionally difficult circumstances. It's the work of postgraduate students like them and our support teams that make any kind of recognition possible.

We are happy to announce that Dr Arshad Jhumka, Dr Gihan Mudalige and Dr Victor Sanchez have been promoted to Reader, effective from 1 August 2021. Quoting from Victor's recommendation,

Dr Sanchez has brought in significant research funding as PI, and as CoI was key to the successful completion of the large IDENTITY project. The size and quality of Dr Sanchez’s research group is impressive, as well as his leadership in joint supervision with colleagues. ... Dr Sanchez is one of the most effective teachers in the department. Every module he has been responsible for has been successful, including in recent years our flagship Machine Learning popular option for 3rd-year undergraduates. Several times, Dr Sanchez has designed or completely redesigned modules, resulting in evidenced student satisfaction.

from Gihan's recommendation,

The career of Dr Gihan Mudalige in the department has been steadily and rapidly progressing upwards since his appointment as Assistant Professor in 2016, marked by such milestones as obtaining a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and being promoted to Associate Professor in 2018, shortly followed by the award of a £1.8M EPSRC-Rolls Royce grant, and taking up the leadership of the department’s high-performance computing research in 2020. ... Dr Mudalige has contributed considerably to the life of the department through his membership and leadership of the Computer Systems Engineering course committee, as well as having been responsible for internships and intercalated years.

and from the recommendation for Arshad,

The high regard of Dr Jhumka’s work by the international research community is clear from his best paper awards, editorial roles, invited talks, and wide network of collaborators. In the department, Dr Jhumka has been a leader in successfully bridging fundamental and applied research. His expertise has been recognized by a range of industrial and government partners, leading to several grants including the current substantial EPSRC PETRAS project. ... Dr Jhumka has introduced a number of practices into his teaching (such as an approach to coursework assignments by group work) that have been popular with students as well as subsequently adopted by other colleagues.

it remains to say many congratulations!