Human-Centred Computing News

We welcomed over 200 visitors to the Department at the Open Day at Warwick on 24th September. There was a full programme of talks, demonstrations and displays with staff, students and alumni also participating. The next University Open Day is on Saturday 12th May 2012. For further details of that, and of Warwick Visits and Campus Tours this term, see

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/visits/opendays/

There is also a Virtual Tour linked from that page. If you are making a Warwick Visit, or an independent visit, and give us advance notice, we shall try and arrange for someone to show you around the Department and have a chat. We can usually do this on a Wednesday or a Friday in the afternoon, but also other times are possible. Please contact Gillian Reeves-Brown on 02476 523193 to make arrangements.

Dr Matthias Englert joined our department as a new Assistant Professor in September 2011.

A short bio:

Matthias received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at the TU Dortmund and then his PhD in Computer Science in 2008 from the RWTH Aachen University, Germany. In 2008 he won the prestigious EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Theoretical Computer Science, hosted by our department in Warwick; title of his project was »Randomisation in Online Algorithms, Load Balancing and other Dynamic Problems«. In September 2008, he joined the Department of Computer Science and DIMAP at the University of Warwick as a Postdoctoral fellow.

His current research interest lies in Theoretical Computer Science, in the area of the analysis of algorithms, more precisely in online algorithms, metric embeddings, load balancing, probabilistic input models, and algorithmic game theory.

For more information please see his page at http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~englert/ ... or stop by in his office CS2.23.

We're very happy to welcome Matthias in our department!

Dr Sara Kalvala has been awarded a grant towards developing tools for Synthetic Biology. The multidisciplinary project, funded by EPSRC and involving colleagues from Nottingham and Sheffield, aims at developing programmable defensive bacterial coatings and skins.

Scientific and technical advances mean that it is practically feasible to insert external genes into bacteria; the difficulty is in making sure the modified bacteria do something useful. For this, it is useful to approach the cell as a machine and its genetic engine as made up of brick-like components that can be combined in different ways. This is the idea behind the new and exciting discipline of Synthetic Biology.

Sara's experience in compilers and formal logics will inform the development of tools which will help assemble genetic networks and model their interactions with host genes. Then, the whole procedure to perform this genetic engineering in an efficient and robust way will be addressed. Then we will be ready to actually manipulate the bacteria and create useful bacterial coatings and skins.

The project is due to start in early 2012, and research staff will be recruited at all three sites. At Warwick we will be looking for a post-doctoral researcher with expertise in both computer science and biology. For further information please contact Sara Kalvala.