Theory and Foundations News
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New spin-out to make e-voting more secure, accessible and trustworthy
Researchers from the Systems and Security theme, Department of Computer Science have created a new spin-out company, SEEV Technologies Ltd, to build end-to-end (E2E) verifiable e-voting systems for future elections. An E2E verifiable voting system allows every voter to verify that their vote is properly cast-as-intended, recorded-as-cast and tallied-as-recorded while preserving the voter's privacy. SEEV (self-enforcing e-voting) is a new paradigm of E2E voting technology that enables voters to fully verify the tallying integrity of an election without needing any trustworthy tallying authority, hence the system is "self-enforcing".
This joint spin-out from the University of Warwick and Newcastle University is built on an ERC-funded starting grant ("Self-Enforcing E-Voting System: Trustworthy Election in Presence of Corrupt Authorities", No. 306994, PI: Professor Feng Hao) initially hosted at Newcastle University and later transferred to the University of Warwick. The company is co-founded by Professor Feng Hao and Dr Siamak Shandahshti (co-inventors), and led by Dr Stewart Hefferman (CEO). SEEV has been prototyped and successfully tested in several trials in the past, supported by an ERC Proof of Concept grant (No. 677124), a Royal Society International collaboration award (CA\R1\180226), and an Innovate UK Cybersecurity Academic Startup Accelerator Programme (CASAP). SEEV Technologies Ltd has received seed funding from Oxford-based Global Initiative to build SEEV systems for real-world elections.
A University of Warwick press release is here.
5 papers accepted to FOCS 2023
Five papers from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) have been accepted to the 64th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2023), the IEEE flagship conference in theoretical computer science that will be held on November 6 - 9, 2023 in Santa Cruz, California, USA:
- "Chasing positive bodies" by Sayan Bhattacharya, Niv Buchbinder, Roie Levin, and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
- "Dynamic (1+epsilon)-approximate matching size in truly sublinear update time" by Sayan Bhattacharya, Peter Kiss, and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
- "Polynomial-time pseudodeterministic construction of primes" by Lijie Chen, Zhenjian Lu, Igor C. Oliveira, Hanlin Ren, and Rahul Santhanam.
- "Approximating edit distance in the fully dynamic model" by Tomasz Kociumaka, Anish Mukherjee, and Barna Saha.
- "Traversing combinatorial 0/1-polytopes via optimization" by Arturo Merino and Torsten Mütze.
Best Paper Award and 5 papers at the 50th ICALP conference
Henry Sinclair-Banks, a PhD student in the the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP), has won a Best Paper Award at ICALP 2023, the 50th EATCS International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP is the main conference and annual meeting of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS).
Henry's paper, co-authored with researchers from Germany and Poland: Marvin Künnemann, Filip Mazowiecki, Lia Schütze, and Karol Węgrzycki, addresses the coverability problem in vector addition systems (VASS), a well-known model of concurrent systems. Coverability is an algorithmic problem for the verification of "safety properties": whether the system always avoids a set of bad states. Henry and his co-authors determine how much time is required to solve this problem in the worst case. They develop an algorithm that improves upon the state of the art that has stood for forty years. They also prove that, in several settings, it is impossible to decide coverability substantially faster, unless there is also a faster algorithm for a classic problem such as Boolean satisfiability (SAT) and finding cycles of fixed length in graphs.
- Michael Benedikt, Dmitry Chistikov, and Alessio Mansutti, "The complexity of Presburger arithmetic with power or powers",
- Sam Coy, Artur Czumaj, Peter Davies, and Gopinath Mishra, "Optimal (degree+1)-coloring in congested clique",
- Charilaos Efthymiou and Weiming Feng, "On the mixing time of Glauber dynamics for the hard-core and related models on G(n,d/n)",
- Marvin Künnemann, Filip Mazowiecki, Lia Schütze, Henry Sinclair-Banks, and Karol Węgrzycki, "Coverability in VASS revisited: Improving Rackoff's bound to obtain conditional optimality",
- Konstantinos Zampetakis and Charilaos Efthymiou, "Broadcasting with random matrices".
This July's ICALP will be the 50th edition of the conference.