The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor Dr. Torsten Mütze, who will be associated with the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP).

Before joining Warwick, Torsten held postdoctoral researcher positions at TU Berlin, Georgia Institute of Technology, and ETH Zürich. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zürich in 2011, under the guidance of Angelika Steger.

The Department of Computer Science has multiple Assistant Professor, Associate Professor or Reader vacancies in Computer Science, with the closing date on June 17, 2019.

The call is open to candidates working in all areas of Computer Science including those related to Theory and the FoCS group (and also DIMAP) research focus. If you are interested in joining one of the best Theory groups in Europe you're welcome to apply!

If you want to learn more, then informal enquires can be addressed to the Head of Department, Prof. Ranko Lazic, or Prof. Artur Czumaj, or any member of the FoCS group.

• algorithmic aspects of game theory and economics,
• approximation algorithms,
• automata and formal languages,
• computational complexity,
• cryptography and quantum computing,
• discrete mathematics, combinatorics, and their applications,
• graph and network algorithms,
• logic and games,
• online and dynamic algorithms,
• parallel and distributed algorithms,
• parameterized complexity and structural graph theory,
• random structures and randomized algorithms,
• sublinear and streaming algorithms,
• string algorithms.

• Sayan Bhattacharya
• Dmitry Chistikov
• Graham Cormode
• Artur Czumaj (group leader)
• Charilaos Efthymiou
• Matthias Englert
• Tom Gur
• Marcin Jurdzinski
• Dan Kral
• Ranko Lazic
• Mike Paterson
• Ramanujan Sridharan
• Alex Tiskin
  
  https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/research/focs/people/
  
  Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/dimap/

The contribution The Reachability Problem for Petri Nets is Not Elementary by Wojciech Czerwinski, Slawomir Lasota, Ranko Lazic, Jerome Leroux and Filip Mazowiecki has won a Best Paper Award at the 51st Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing, to be held on June 23-26, 2019 in Phoenix, AZ.

This work, which was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, shows that the central verification problem for Petri nets is much harder than has been known since the landmark result of Richard Lipton in 1976. Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are a long established model of concurrency with extensive applications in modelling and analysis of hardware, software and database systems, as well as chemical, biological and business processes.

In January 2019, Dr. Charilaos Efthymiou joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, as a member of the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and of the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP).

Before joining us, Charilaos held research positions in various universities including Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, as a DFG Fellow, College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and School of Informatics a the University of Edinburgh, UK. This is not his first time at the University of Warwick, he has been a post-doc researcher at DIMAP (2010-2012). Charilaos completed his PhD at the University of Patras, Greece, in 2009.

His research is in the intersection of theory of algorithms, discrete mathematics and statistical physics. Specifically, he studies how powerful notions from statistical physics, e.g., phase transitions, affect the performance of algorithms for various problems in computer science and mathematics.

More information about Charilaos can be found on his personal web-page https://sites.google.com/site/charisefthymiou/.

The 2018 Open Mind Prize was awarded to Andrzej Grzesik, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science and a member of the DIMAP centre. The Open Mind Prize is awarded biennially during the Polish Combinatorial Conference to a junior Polish researcher for outstanding research in combinatorics. Andrzej completed his PhD in 2015 at Jagiellonian University in Kraków and joined the University of Warwick in October 2017. His research achievements include solutions to two extremal graph theory problems posed by Erdős and a conjecture of Lovász concerning finitely forcible graph limits.

In the Logic, Semantics, Automata and Theory of Programming track of the 45th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP), three out of 30 accepted papers are by members of the department. ICALP is one of the most selective and longest established international conferences in computer science, and the flagship annual event of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. The papers are:

• Reducing CMSO Model Checking to Highly Connected Graphs by Ramanujan M. S., Daniel Lokshtanov, Saket Saurabh and Meirav Zehavi
• O-Minimal Invariants for Linear Loops by Shaull Almagor, Dmitry Chistikov, Joel Ouaknine and James Worrell
• When is Containment Decidable for Probabilistic Automata? by Laure Daviaud, Ranko Lazić, Marcin Jurdziński, Filip Mazowiecki, Guillermo Perez and James Worrell