The contribution The Reachability Problem for Petri Nets is Not Elementary by Wojciech Czerwinski, Slawomir Lasota, Ranko Lazic, Jerome Leroux and Filip Mazowiecki has won a Best Paper Award at the 51st Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing, to be held on June 23-26, 2019 in Phoenix, AZ.

This work, which was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, shows that the central verification problem for Petri nets is much harder than has been known since the landmark result of Richard Lipton in 1976. Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are a long established model of concurrency with extensive applications in modelling and analysis of hardware, software and database systems, as well as chemical, biological and business processes.

There will be a Public Lecture by Professor Alison Etheridge (University of Oxford) on the topic "Modelling genes: the Backwards and Forwards of Mathematical Population Genetics"

The Lecture will take place on:
Thursday May 16th, 2019 - MS.01 Zeeman building (Maths and Stats), 6:15pm.

Further details, and a link to the registration page, can be found be clicking on the following link:
Info&Registration

Quantum computing is entering a new era of remotely-accessible quantum machines and, given their recent development, computation is more than likely accompanied by errors. One such error—quantum leakage—is an often-overlooked imperfection that amounts to quantum information escaping from the desired computational space and whose presence is rarely identified by a remote user. In work published in Physical Review A (DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.99.032328) Armands (who began this work as a part of his MPhys project), Animesh, and George adapt one of dimension witness protocols designed for the purpose of a remote discovery of leakage and equip it with statistically robust, user-defined confidence levels before applying to a remotely accessed quantum processor. They find a circuit component "transmon" acting in a higher computational space than advertised.

Their study constitutes the first, model-independent experimental discovery of leakage in a remotely-accessed quantum computer. They have achieved this by a substantive theoretical development of the method of delays, originally adopted from classical chaos theory and proposed for quantum systems in a path-breaking paper almost a decade ago.

Such finding confirms the imperfection of current quantum computers, but at the same, guides the engineers to small step improvements that would eventually lead to the ultimate goal of fault-tolerant quantum computation.

Warwick colleagues select some of the most important elements to them from the Periodic Table, an idea first presented by Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev 150 years ago this month.

The highly successful Lab Experience day programme in the School of Life Sciences has been running for over 7 years. Students from over 20 different schools and colleges have attended.

This year, the Lab Experience days will be held daily from Monday 1 July to Friday 5 July 2019.

Full details of Lab Experience days

Warwick Engineering researchers have been inspired by the unique movement of trembling aspen leaves, to devise an energy harvesting mechanism that could power weather sensors in hostile environments and could even be a back-up energy supply that could save and extend the life of future Mars rovers

Dr Kogila Balakrishnan Director of Client and Business Development at WMG, University of Warwick, Dr Kogila Balakrishnan, is on the expert panel on Friday (12^th April) at the Chevening Conference 2019.

She joins senior academics from across the world, Chevening Alumni, and inspiring community leaders for Chevening’s 35^th annual conference entitled ‘Pushing boundaries and shaping the future.’

Dr Balakrishnan, a Chevening Alumnus herself, will discuss, debate, and share ideas on pushing boundaries and the importance of building international networks, as well as those documented in her recent book ‘Technology Offsets in International Defence Procurement.’ The book is the first to focus on both the theory and practice of offsets, combining developmental economic theories, technology theories, business and management theories and international business practice.

Dr Balakrishnan is responsible for international business development, research in defence management and offsets as well as teaching at WMG. Her specific role is to develop and enhance education and research collaboration focused in Malaysia and South East Asia.

Find out more and book your place here.

HetSys is an entirely new EPSRC-supported Centre for Doctoral Training spread across 5 academic departments including Mathematics. It is recruiting enthusiastic students (first intake October 2019) from across the physical sciences who enjoy using their mathematical skills and thinking flexibly to solve complex problems. By developing these skills HetSys will train people to challenge current state-of-the-art in computational modelling of heterogeneous, ‘real world’ systems across a range of research themes such as nanoscale devices, new catalysts, superalloys, smart fluids, laser-plasma interactions, underpinned by research into the mathematical foundations of the associated computational models.
HetSys Homepage

University announcement for MathSys and HetSys

Third year medical student Ciara Doyle has presented her mental health research in Parliament.