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.

The MAA has awarded Mike Paterson and his collaborator Uri Zwick the Lester R. Ford Award for their article Overhang in the American Mathematical Monthly. The problem of how far off the edge of a table one can reach by stacking n identical blocks first appeared in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1923. A classical solution achieving an overhang logarithmic in n was widely believed to be optimal. The article clarifies the problem and shows that the overhang can be made exponentially larger than this.

Rajagopal Nagarajan gave an invited talk at the Hypercomputation Workshop (Hypernet '10) held in conjunction with the 9th International Conference on Unconventional Computation (UC 2010) in Tokyo, Japan, 21-25 June, 2010. His talk was titled Formal Methods for Quantum Information Science. A paper based on this work has been accepted to the special issue of the International Journal of Unconventional Computation.