Theory and Foundations News
Archive news content can be found here.
Promotion to Assistant Professor
We are happy to share the news that Dr Alex Dixon has been promoted to the position of Assistant Professor, effective from 1 May 2023. Alex joined our department as a Teaching Fellow in September 2021, while still completing his PhD research. Despite juggling both roles, he has made significant contributions to the department's activities. Many congratulations to Alex for his accomplishments in completing his PhD research and for earning this well-deserved promotion.
Cambridge-Oxford-Warwick Quantum Computing Project
An EPSRC Robust and Reliable Quantum Computing Grant will be awarded to Anuj Dawar (Cambridge), Tom Gur (Warwick), Tom Melham (Oxford), and Sergii Strelchuk (Cambridge). The project sets out to explore the role of symmetry and structure in quantum computation, with applications to classical verification and simulation of quantum computation.
In addition, the project aims to strengthen and create new connections and collaborations between Cambridge, Oxford, and Warwick in the field of Quantum Computing (building on existing initiatives such as the Cambridge-Warwick Quantum Colloquium) and establish new partnerships with Warwick Quantum.
5+ papers accepted to STOC 2023
Several papers from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) have been accepted to the 55th ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2023), the ACM flagship conference in theoretical computer science that will be held on June 20-23, 2023 in Orlando, Florida, USA:
- "Kneser graphs are Hamiltonian" by Arturo Merino, Torsten Mütze, and Namrata.
- "A duality between one-way functions and average-case symmetry of information" by Shuichi Hirahara, Rahul Ilango, Zhenjian Lu, Mikito Nanashima, and Igor C. Oliveira.
- "Unprovability of strong complexity lower bounds in bounded arithmetic" by Jiatu Li and Igor C. Oliveira.
- "Sublinear algorithms for (1.5+ϵ)-approximate matching" by Sayan Bhattacharya, Peter Kiss, and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
- "Towards the Erdős-Gallai cycle decomposition conjecture" by Matija Bucic and Richard Montgomery.
Further, there are two more accepted papers autored by Shuichi Hirahara, who was affiliated with the department and the FoCS group during the submission time, in Autumn 2022:
- "Capturing one-way functions via NP-hardness of meta-complexity" by Shuichi Hirahara.
- "Hardness self-amplification: Simplified, optimized, and unified" by Shuichi Hirahara and Nobutaka Shimizu.