Human-Centred Computing News

The department went to the Cheltenham Science Festival this year, with hands on demonstrations showcasing Data Science research and other departmental research topics.

Data Science involves finding meaning in large volumes of unstructured data. Its many applications include predicting election results from social media, improving traffic flows and detecting breast cancer.

Computer Science also joined forces with members of the Psychology Department to run a very successful drop-in session exploring different aspects of threat, safety and well-being. Participants joined Warwick staff and students in a variety of research-inspired activities ranging from saving pandas from extinction to detecting dangerous spoof websites.

Rory Cellan-Jones, technology correspondent for the BBC, chaired a session the dangers when Big Data becomes a tool for Big Brother style surveillance. Rory wrote an article about the dangers posed the misuse of Big Data.

Professors Stephen Jarvis and Rob Procter were amongst the experts from Warwick discussing Data Science with members of the public at the free Ideas Café event.

Background Information

The Computer Science department at Warwick is one of the oldest and most established Computer Science Departments in the UK. It offers both a BSc in Data Science and a MSc in Data Analytics.

On June 1st 2015, our Division of Theory and Foundations, jointly with DIMAP, organized DIMAP Logic Day 2015. The goal of the event was to bring together the UK community of researchers and graduate students interested in the study of logics, automata and games.

The event had an outstanding list of invited speakers from leading academic institutions and research labs (Nathalie Bertrand, INRIA Rennes; Antonin Kucera, Brno; Slawomir Lasota, Warsaw; Davide Sangiorgi, Bologna, INRIA Sophia Antipolis; Sylvain Schmitz, Cachan, INRIA Saclay, Warwick; James Worrell, Oxford) presenting recent advances in logic in computer science, and attracted over 40 participants from the UK and abroad.

The European Research Council (ERC) has just announced that two Warwick Computer Science Professors, Graham Cormode and Dan Kráľ, have been among the winners of its Consolidator Grant competition. ERC Consolidator Grants is funding 372 top mid-career scientists with €713 million to pursue their best ideas, as part of the European Union Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020. Grants are worth up to €2.75 million each, with an average of €1.91 million per grant. The funding will enable them to consolidate their research teams and to develop their most innovative ideas.

Graham Cormode has been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for a project entitled "Small Summaries for Big Data". The project focuses on the area of the design and analysis of compact summaries: data structures which capture key features of the data, and which can be created effectively over distributed data sets. The project will substantially advance the state of the art in data summarization, to the point where accurate and effective summaries are available for a wide array of problems, and can be used seamlessly in applications that process big data.

Dan Kráľ has been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for a project entitled "Large Discrete Structures". The project will advance theory of combinatorial limits, which combines methods from analysis, combinatorics, computer science, group theory and probability theory to analyze and approximate large discrete structures (such as graphs, which can be used to represent large computer networks). The project will lead to proposing new mathematical methods to represent such discrete structures and to applications of the new methods to specific problems in extremal combinatorics and algorithm design.