FoCS is involved in a number of upcoming events and seminars at Warwick that highlight the contribution that the mathematical sciences (Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics) can make to the understanding of "big data". These include seminars from a number of influential researchers in this area, and one-day events bringing together speakers and researchers from around the world. The potential of "big data" to improve business, healthcare, and government has been greatly discussed in the popular media. These events will focus on new computational and mathematical insights to achieve these goals.

The EPSRC has recently announced funding for a new Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Urban Science, which will train scientists to harvest and process big data in order to develop a better understanding of the science of cities, and to apply that knowledge to find smart solutions to urban problems. Prof Graham Cormode, one of the key members of FoCS, is he Co-PI of the CDT.

This new CDT is led by Computer Science at Warwick, and involves partnership with the cities of New York and Birmingham. Several industry partners are backing the centre, including IBM, URS, AT&T, Cisco, E.ON and British Gas. The centre will support over 50 new PhD students over the next 5 years and each student will have the opportunity to work as part of a larger cohort, involving students from Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, University of Toronto and IIT Mumbai.

The CDT will provide EPSRC-funded PhD students with an unprecedented opportunity to work with industry experts and alongside our city officials on real-world urban science problems. Seldom have so many international academic institutions, leading businesses and city agencies been focused on one activity; seldom has the opportunity arisen to develop scientific solutions that will have direct impact on billions of the world’s population.” [Deputy Mayor New York City]

Leslie Valiant was awarded Honorary Doctor of Science today during the University of Warwick 2013 summer graduation ceremony.

Leslie Valiant was educated at King's College, Cambridge; Imperial College, London; and at the University of Warwick, where he received his PhD in computer science in 1974. He is currently T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1982. Before coming to Harvard he had taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Leeds University, and the University of Edinburgh.

His work has ranged over several areas of theoretical computer science, particularly complexity theory, learning, and parallel computation. He also has interests in computational neuroscience, evolution and artificial intelligence. Leslie is the author of two books, Circuits of the Mind, and Probably Approximately Correct.

He received the Nevanlinna Prize at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1986, the Knuth Award in 1997, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science EATCS Award in 2008, and the 2010 A. M. Turing Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

Above picture shows Leslie Valiant and his PhD advisor, Prof Mike Paterson, reconciling in the University of Warwick in July 2013.

We have a new opening for Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2 years) in the area Advances in Discrete Mathematics and its Applications in the Analysis of Algorithms, as a part of a new Strategic Alliance between the University of Warwick and the Queen Mary University of London.

Closing date for applications: September 23, 2013. 

Candidates are required to have a PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, or related discipline, and should be able to demonstrate excellent research potential in discrete mathematics or applications in algorithms and/or optimization. The post-doc will be associated with DIMAP and the Foundations of Computer Science Research Group at the University of Warwick, and will have the opportunity to work with world-leading researchers in Algorithms and in Discrete Mathematics, including Graham Cormode, Artur Czumaj, Matthias Englert, Dan Král', Vadim Lozin, Mike Paterson, Oleg Pikhurko, Maxim Sviridenko, ....

See here for more details.

Graham Cormode has just joined the Department as a Professor associated with the Centre for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).

Graham completed his PhD at the University of Warwick in 2002. His postdoctoral work was at the DIMACS center in Rutgers University. Subsequently, he has worked as a researcher at Bell Labs, and AT&T Shannon Laboratories in New Jersey. His work considers aspects of managing and working with large amounts of data, with particular emphasis on privacy and anonymization, and large scale analytics. Dr. Cormode has published over 100 papers in international journals and refereed conferences. He is the recipient of two best paper awards. He has served on the program committees of numerous conferences, and is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and for ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

For more information about Graham’s research please see his web page at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/Graham_Cormode.

Congratulations to our FoCS colleague Marcin Jurdziński, for winning the best paper award at the main European conference in Theoretical Computer Science ICALP 2013 (Track B), for the paper Reachability in Two-Clock Timed Automata is PSPACE-complete he co-authored with John Fearnley (a Warwick PhD, currently at the University of Liverpool).

John and Marcin's paper is one of six Warwick papers accepted for presentation at ICALP.

Andrzej Murawski joined the Department in January 2013 as an Associate Professor. His doctoral degree is from the University of Oxford, where he was also a Junior Research Fellow (St John's College) and subsequently an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow. Before coming to Warwick he held a Lectureship at the University of Leicester.

Andrzej's research concerns the semantics of programming languages and its applications to program verification. In particular, he has extensive expertise in modelling logical systems and programming languages using games, an area known as game semantics.

Andrzej has served on program committees of international conferences such as FOSSACS, ICALP, LICS and POPL. He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College and Publicity Chair of LICS. His research has been supported by EPSRC, LMS and the Royal Society.

Andrzej teaches CS245 Automata and Formal Languages and CS246 Further Automata and Formal Languages in Term II.

For more information about Andrzej’s research please see his web page at http://www.cs.le.ac.uk/people/amurawski/.

A recent workshop at Dagstuhl provided the opportunity for this photo of five generations of the PhD advisor relationship. From bottom to top we have Mike Paterson (Warwick), Leslie Valiant (Harvard), Mark Jerrum (Queen Mary College), Leslie Ann Goldberg (Liverpool) and Andreas Goebel (Liverpool).