FoCS News

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick invites applications from candidates with proven excellence in research in computer science for the new opening as Assistant Professor in Computer Science.

Candidates are required to have a PhD in Computer Science or related discipline, should be able to demonstrate excellent research potential in computer science, and should be capable of research leadership, e.g., co-supervising MSc and PhD students in Computer Science and contributing to the preparation of research grants. Ideally the candidate will complement the research in the Department, but other research areas will also be considered in particularly strong cases. Special considerations will be given to candidates with interdisciplinary interests and industrial research experience. Candidates should also have excellent teaching skills as they will be expected to deliver taught modules in Computer Science and contribute to curriculum development.

To apply, please follow the instructions available on the official University web-page.

Please quote job vacancy reference number 31100-112.

Closing date for applications: 7 January 2013 (midnight British time).

£37,012 - £44,116 pa

More details can be found here.

Daniel Kral joins the Department of Computer Science and the Warwick Mathematics Institute as a new Professor in October 2012. He is affiliated with the DIMAP Centre and with the FoCS Research group.

Daniel obtained his PhD in Computer Science in 2004 from Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Then he spent time as a postdoc at the Technical University Berlin, visiting assistant professor and Fulbright scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, Charles University, Prague, and finally a tenured associate professor post at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science Institute, Charles University, Prague.

Daniel's primary research interest lies on the boundary of discrete mathematics, combinatorics, and algorithms design. More detailed list of his interest includes extremal combinatorics and dense combinatorial objects, use of combinatorial optimization techniques in graph theory, structural graph theory, in particular, graph coloring, graph and matroid decompositions and their algorithmic applications. He published around 100 journal papers in leading international journals, including publications in Advances in Mathematics, Combinatorica, Computational Complexity, Israel Journal of Mathematics, Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A and B, Journal of Graph Theory and SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. Conference publication include those at FOCS, ICALP, SODA and STACS conferences. Daniel's research has been highly recognised by the number of invited plenary talks at international conferences, he has been awarded the prestigious European Prize in Combinatorics in 2011, and he is the recipient of ERC Starting Grant 2010 »Classes of Combinatorial Objects - from Structure to Algorithms«.

For more information about Daniel's research please visit his homepage.

Anna Adamaszek successfully completed her PhD with the Thesis entitled "Approximation Algorithms for Geometric, Caching and Scheduling Problems", under the supervision of Prof Artur Czumaj.

Anna's PhD focuses on the study of approximation algorithms for optimization problems, one of the core areas of modern theoretical computer science. She has obtained research results in two areas: geometric optimisation algorithms and online algorithms. In the first topic, she presented new approximation algorithms for the capacitated location routing problem and the capacitated network design problem in the Euclidean plane. For online algorithms, she made a major progress in the study of two well known caching and scheduling problems: the generalized caching problem and the reordering buffer management problem. Her research has been presented in several most prestigious conferences in the field, including STOC'2011, ICALP'2011, and SODA'2012.

After completing PhD in Warwick, Ania moved to Germany, where she has been awarded a prestigious Lise-Meitner-Award postdoctoral fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik in Saarbrücken.

Maxim Sviridenko joins the Department of Computer Science as a new Professor in January 2012.

Maxim obtained his PhD in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science in 1999 from the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics and Novosibirsk State University. Then he spent two years as a post-doc at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Aarhus University, and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, before becoming a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights in December 2001.

Maxim's primary research interest lies in the area of the design and analysis of algorithms for discrete optimization problems. He published over 50 papers in top Computer Science, Operations Research and Discrete Mathematics journals and conferences. He designed several algorithms with best known performance guarantees for such classical optimization models as traveling salesman problem, generalized assignment problems, submodular maximization, multi-dimensional bin packing problems, job shop scheduling with various objective functions, and other inventory and supply chain management problems. He has been also working on the design of practical algorithms and modeling of the optimization problems arising in practice.

For more information about Maxim's research please visit his IBM homepage.

Dr Matthias Englert , who was a post-doc with the FoCS group in the last three year, since September 2011 joined our department as a new Assistant Professor.

A short bio:

Matthias received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at the TU Dortmund and then his PhD in Computer Science in 2008 from the RWTH Aachen University, Germany. In 2008 he won the prestigious EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Theoretical Computer Science, hosted by our department in Warwick; title of his project was »Randomisation in Online Algorithms, Load Balancing and other Dynamic Problems«. In September 2008, he joined the FoCS group at the Department of Computer Science and DIMAP at the University of Warwick as a Postdoctoral fellow.

His current research interest lies in Theoretical Computer Science, in the area of the analysis of algorithms, more precisely in online algorithms, metric embeddings, load balancing, probabilistic input models, and algorithmic game theory.

For more information please see his page at http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~englert/ ... or stop by in his office CS2.23.

Dr Amin Coja-Oghlan, a FoCS member and Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of Computer Science and Warwick Mathematics Instititue, has been awarded the ERC Starting Grant.

ERC Starting Grant is one of the most prestigious grants awarded by the European Research Council for world-class researchers, and Amin is one of the very few researchers in Warwick to receive this grant. His new ERC Starting Grant, worth over a million of euros for the period of five years, has been awarded for his project »Phase Transitions and Computational Complexity«.

Dr Coja-Oghlan's main research area is in the Theoretical Computer Science, with special focus on the study of Algorithms and Complexity via rigorous mathematical methods, on the boundary of computing, combinatorics, and probability. He published pver 30 papers in refereed journals (eight as a sole author) and a similar number of papers in the proceedings of international Computer Science conferences. He is the winner or the EATCS Award for the best paper in Track A at the 36th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2009), and he has been an invited speaker at numerous international conferences in computer science and in mathematics.

ACM has named Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science. Valiant brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and computer vision. He also launched several subfields of theoretical computer science, and developed models for parallel computing. The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing," is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc. Les Valiant received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Warwick in 1974. His PhD supervisor was Professor Mike Paterson.

The outcome of a succesful collaboration between Warwick computer scientists and biologists has been published in the October 2010 issue of The Plant Journal, in a paper entitled  "Evolutionary analysis of regulatory sequences in plants". The paper is co-authored by Alexander Tiskin and Peter Krusche of the FoCS research group, Emma Picot and Isabelle Carre of Warwick's Department of Biological Sciences, and Sascha Ott of the Warwick Systems Biology Research Centre. It describes a robust and highly sensitive method for identifying evolutionary conserved regions in plant DNA, based on algorithms and software developed by the FoCS group. The result is a significant step towards understanding gene networks.