Human-Centred Computing News

This year’s Warwick Postgraduate Colloquium in Computer Science, WPCCS 2018, took place on Friday 29th June. The colloquium, an annual student-run event, showcased research performed by the postgraduate research (PGR) students in Computer Science, the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) and the CDT in Urban Science and Progress.

Continuing a new tradition for the colloquium, this year’s event was held in The Oculus, University of Warwick. In addition to presentations from students in each of the department’s research areas, staff and external speakers offered guest talks. These centred on language design patterns in 2018, the evolution and horizons of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and WebEXR, an online high dynamic range image viewer.

Florin Ciucu, the director of postgraduate research studies in the Department of Computer Science, said of the event:

WPCCS is an excellent opportunity for our students to widely expose where they currently stand in their research. It’s a fantastic way for them to contribute by sharing their research experiences, ideas and visions with their peers and the wider research community.

WPCCS 2018 showcased over 45 presentations and 25 posters of the latest research in the Department of Computer Science. WPCCS aims to foster an air of collaborative research amongst the department’s PGR students and open many conversations between the department’s postgraduate researchers and others. Thank you to all who attended and participated, we look forward to seeing you again next year.

To find out more about WPCCS 2018 or to provide feedback, please visit https://warwick.ac.uk/wpccs18.

We are delighted to report that Dr Theo Damoulas and Dr Gihan Mudalige have successfully completed their probations early, and become Associate Professors at the start of this month. Quoting from their probationary review reports,

Gihan has had a number of successes with attracting substantial research funding, most recently for two projects with AWE PLC, and one with Rolls Royce PLC. A further major success is Gihan’s Royal Society Industrial Fellowship, which will run over the next 4 academic years at 50% of Gihan’s time. ... Dr Gihan Mudalige is an outstanding and valuable member of the department’s academic staff, whose many likely future contributions to both research and teaching we are looking forward to.

and

Dr Theo Damoulas is a valuable asset to both Computer Science and Statistics departments in all of the research, teaching, administration and collegiality areas. Theo is already a next-generation research leader at the national and international levels, in particular enhancing the university's partnerships with the Alan Turing Institute, CUSP London, King's College London, and New York University.

it remains to say many congratulations!

Adi Shamir, the Paul and Marlene Borman Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, has been elected this week a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He is a co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman), a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme (along with Uriel Feige and Amos Fiat), one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science.

In 1976/77, Adi was a post-doctoral researcher in Computer Science at Warwick!