Our teams from Warwick DCS have won both the 1st and 2nd place at the Zero Cost NAS Competition held in conjunction with the AutoML'22 conference.

Over the recent year, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has attracted a lot of attention. While being able to automate the discovery of better performing neural architectures than hand-crafted ones, it comes at a great price, requiring thousands of GPU hours to perform the search. The Zero Cost NAS competition challenges the participants to design efficient proxies for NAS, using negligible computational resources to evaluate neural architectures.

In collaboration with the AutoCAML team at Samsung AI Cambridge (led by Dr. Hongkai Wen), our research students, Lichuan Xiang and Youyang Sha, proposed new zero-cost NAS metrics that exploit the compressibility of neural networks. Our metrics are extremely efficient to run (reducing search cost from weeks/days to minutes), and achieves impressive results across multiple search spaces and datasets. In the competition, our teams won both the 1st and 2nd places (using different scoring functions), and the performance gap with the 3rd winning team is almost 2x. Checkout our poster here.

Congratulations to Professor Chenlei Leng who has been awarded an EPSRC Small Grant for the project 'Statistical Network Models: Building the Foundation'.

It's finally here, the new molecular viewer "AniMol" (ANImated MOLecules) is in beta for free public use. AniMol allows you to create interactive views of molecular structures or dynamics thereof and then gives a permanent link and QR code image for access from anywhere, including on mobile devices. For example, check out the #sarscov2 spike proteins' plausible opening/closing motion at https://lnkd.in/ec7RpSyz or https://lnkd.in/eyT_DpEx.

AniMol was created by current Maths and Physics 3rd year student James Panayis working with recent Warwick Physics graduate James Partington and Prof. Rudo Roemer from theory group. Their work has been funded in part by a Warwick InnovationsLink opens in a new window "Impact Acceleration Account" fund.

Professor Julie MacPherson has joined other successful scientists to encourage women to apply for Royal Society Industry Fellowships in a new video. Read more.

Sarah Bennett (Research Support Facility Manager, WISB) and other Warwick technicians, met with senior leaders from UKRI to share their experiences of the research and innovation ecosystem and discuss opportunities offered through the Research England funded TALENT programme. This unique networking opportunity was organised by Midlands Innovation as part of a two-day visit to the region in July to help inform UKRI’s new five-year strategy.
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It was an honour to welcome Stephen Kinnock MP and Jessica Morden MP, Chair and Vice Chair respectively, of the Steel All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), to WMG at the University of Warwick this week.

The guests were met by Professor Claire Davis and Dr Russell Hall from the Advanced Steel Research Centre, and Dean of WMG, Professor Robin Clark.

They enjoyed a tour of the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Centre (AMMC), home to WMG’s world-class steels research facilities, where they heard more about WMG’s work to support the steel industry including the importance of green steel production for a sustainable future.

Stephen Kinnock MP Chair of the Steel APPG and Jessica Morden MPVice Chair of the Steel APPG commented: “It was great to visit Claire Davis and her team at WMG's Advanced Materials Manufacturing Centre to see for ourselves the industrial research and development they're working on with the UK Steel sector, including cutting the cost of developing new steel alloys, deploying alternative fuels for green steel production or converting scrap steel to high value products.

“Innovation has a crucial role in improving the quality of UK steel production, reducing energy costs and making UK steel sustainable and it was heartening to see academics and industry working together on these critical issues for the future of UK steel, which is so important for our country."

Professor Claire Davis said: “Stephen and Jess were really interested in hearing about the work we do in the Advanced Steel Research Centre. It was great to show them examples of our fundamental and applied research supporting the development of new steel processing and alloys, and the impact it has for the UK steel industry. It is a very exciting, and challenging time to be working on steel due to the pace of change as we move to green steel production.”

Find out more about WMG’s Steels Processing research here: Steels processing (warwick.ac.uk)

The Warwick Mathematics Institute has been named as one of the world’s top mathematics departments by QS World University Rankings.

Overall, the University of Warwick has been named as one of the world’s top 100 universities for the study of 16 subjects, according to the 2021 edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject. The rankings, compiled by global higher education analysts QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) examined 14,435 individual university programs, taken by students at 1,452 universities across the world.

The University of Warwick’s best performances were in Mathematics, and in Statistics, which were both ranked 21st in the world.

We recently interviewed Dr Shahed Yousaf, Warwick Medical School alumnus who graduated in 2006. He lives in Birmingham and has been a GP for ten years working with the homeless and with prisoners. He is also an accomplished writer, starting off his writing career with fiction, he has now published ‘Stitched Up’ which follows his career in medicine working with patients on the edge of society.