The Department will be welcoming Dr Laurent Doyen of CNRS and ENS Paris-Saclay as a Rutherford Visiting Fellow in 2018/19. This prestigious funding, whose aim is to attract top global talent into the UK, will allow Dr Doyen to collaborate closely with Dr Laure Daviaud, Dr Marcin Jurdzinski and Dr Ranko Lazic of DIMAP, as well as Dr Nathanael Fijalkow of the Alan Turing Institute, on cutting-edge research on fast algorithms for synthesis of safe, smart and adaptive controllers.

Professor Graham Cormode, the University of Warwick and Alan Turing Institute Liaison Director, commented:

Dr Doyen's Rutherford Visiting Fellowship will provide a major boost to building world-leading and long-lasting collaborative links among the Alan Turing Institute, the DIMAP multi-disciplinary research centre at Warwick, and LSV at ENS Paris-Saclay. The latter is an established European centre of excellence in logical aspects of computer and data sciences.

The Theory and Foundations Division is welcoming Dr Laure Daviaud, who will be the Research Fellow working with Dr Marcin Jurdzinski and Dr Ranko Lazic on the EPSRC project on Parity Games.

Prior to coming to Warwick, Laure was a postdoc on the ERC project Lipa (Uniwersytet Warszawski), as well as at LIP (ENS Lyon) and LIF (Université d'Aix-Marseille). She obtained her PhD at LIAFA (Université Paris Diderot, CNRS).

Laure's research interests include automata theory, verification, logic, quantitative models and transducers, weighted automata, streaming models, algebraic language theory and topology, tropical algebra and semigroup of matrices.

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.

Professor Graham Cormode has been awarded the 2017 Adams Prize by the Cambridge Faculty of Mathematics. The award recognizes his work on "Statistical Analysis of Big Data", and is awarded jointly with Professor Richard Samworth of Cambridge. Professor Cormode says,

My work, in common with Prof Samworth's, is about finding mathematical representations of data that allow useful information to be extracted effectively and accurately. These techniques allow ever larger quantities of data to be handled on ordinary computers.

Professor Cormode's work on "data sketches" has been used in companies such as Netflix, Yahoo, Twitter, Google, AT&T and Sprint. He is currently leading Warwick's involvement in the Alan Turing Institute at London, and working on questions to do with verification of machine learning, and privacy.

The prize is worth £15,000 and will be split equally between the two recipients.

As a Residential Fellow of Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study, Dr Sylvain Schmitz is visiting the department 20-24 March 2017, for collaborative research with Dr Ranko Lazic and other members of DIMAP.

Schmitz (PhD University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis 2007) is an Assistant Professor at ENS Paris-Saclay and a permanent member of LSV, one of the top European research centres in logical aspects of computer science. In 2015, Schmitz was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Warwick. An author of over 40 articles in international journals and conferences, Schmitz's work has attracted over 500 citations, won best-paper awards, and been presented at several invited talks and European doctoral schools.

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.

as well as

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.