In further good news, Dr Tanaya Guha and Dr Ramanujan Sridharan have been promoted to Associate Professor, effective from 1 July 2021 and 2 October 2021 (respectively). Many congratulations to them, whose recommendations in particular state:

[Dr Guha has] grown her research group to five PhD students currently, and attracted a portfolio of research grants in her career, including recently a substantial award from Ford. ... In engagement, Dr Guha has been raising the visibility of Warwick in her national and international research communities through her invited talks, leadership in the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing, programme committee memberships, and conference organisation activities. She has also contributed substantially to the Sutton Trust summer school, a key outreach programme.

and

Dr Sridharan’s high standing in the research community is confirmed by his invited talks at international meetings and leading universities, memberships of the programme committees of prestigious conferences, and his organisation of international research events. ... In teaching, Dr Sridharan has successfully led (jointly and individually) two undergraduate modules. The feedback from students has been generally positive, with many appreciative of Dr Sridharan’s innovative and energetic delivery.

We are delighted to report that Dr Josiah Lutton and Dr Pavel Veselý, Research Fellows from the Department of Computer Science, have been named joint winners of a SEM Faculty Post Doctoral Prize.

Each year, the University of Warwick's Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine (SEM) funds a prize for the best Warwick-affiliated research output from an Early Career Researcher. Each department nominates a winner, or joint winners, out of the applications received after a judging process as determined by the Faculty.

Professor Yulan He, who led the Department's selection, commented:

Pavel's paper on quantile summary, co-authored with Professor Graham Cormode, was published in a top-tier conference on theoretical databases, Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) co-located with SIGMOD. The tight lower bound for quantile summaries proposed in this work is a deep theoretical exploration central to data management. The work led to a collaboration with Splunk, a US-based company that focuses on processing machine-generated big data. The follow-up paper has been accepted to the 2021 edition of the PODS conference. The result has a great potential for a broader impact. Josiah's work is on medical imaging. Together with Dr Sharon Collier and Professor Till Bretschneider, they proposed an enhanced 3D segmentation method (with a curvature-based enhancement term), which outperforms the best-of-breed random walker method in Dictyostelium image volumes. The work was published in a top journal, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, with an impact factor of 6.68. Josiah presented his method at the Actin 2020 meeting and was awarded a prize for best imaging in a talk by the Royal Microscopical Society and has been featured in an article in their inFocus magazine.

We are happy to announce that Dr Arshad Jhumka, Dr Gihan Mudalige and Dr Victor Sanchez have been promoted to Reader, effective from 1 August 2021. Quoting from Victor's recommendation,

Dr Sanchez has brought in significant research funding as PI, and as CoI was key to the successful completion of the large IDENTITY project. The size and quality of Dr Sanchez’s research group is impressive, as well as his leadership in joint supervision with colleagues. ... Dr Sanchez is one of the most effective teachers in the department. Every module he has been responsible for has been successful, including in recent years our flagship Machine Learning popular option for 3rd-year undergraduates. Several times, Dr Sanchez has designed or completely redesigned modules, resulting in evidenced student satisfaction.

from Gihan's recommendation,

The career of Dr Gihan Mudalige in the department has been steadily and rapidly progressing upwards since his appointment as Assistant Professor in 2016, marked by such milestones as obtaining a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and being promoted to Associate Professor in 2018, shortly followed by the award of a £1.8M EPSRC-Rolls Royce grant, and taking up the leadership of the department’s high-performance computing research in 2020. ... Dr Mudalige has contributed considerably to the life of the department through his membership and leadership of the Computer Systems Engineering course committee, as well as having been responsible for internships and intercalated years.

and from the recommendation for Arshad,

The high regard of Dr Jhumka’s work by the international research community is clear from his best paper awards, editorial roles, invited talks, and wide network of collaborators. In the department, Dr Jhumka has been a leader in successfully bridging fundamental and applied research. His expertise has been recognized by a range of industrial and government partners, leading to several grants including the current substantial EPSRC PETRAS project. ... Dr Jhumka has introduced a number of practices into his teaching (such as an approach to coursework assignments by group work) that have been popular with students as well as subsequently adopted by other colleagues.

it remains to say many congratulations!

We are delighted to report that Dr Greg Watson and Dr Lin Gui have been promoted to, respectively, Senior Teaching Fellow and Senior Research Fellow, effective from 1 August 2021. Quoting from their recommendations,

What particularly stands out ... is the virtuous circle of (1) Dr Watson’s continual striving for advancing his teaching expertise, evidenced by the extensive courses he has both attended and contributed to, (2) the strong two-way links between Dr Watson’s development and his teaching practice (and that of his peers), evidenced by the various different changes and improvements that he introduced in the classroom based on his scholarly educational investigations, and (3) the consistent very positive feedback from different groups of students as well as colleagues.

and

Dr Lin Gui is one of the most successful postdoctoral researchers in the recent history of the Department, and is continuing his research career with us after a prestigious two-year Marie Curie fellowship. He has been building a solid and high-flying international reputation, underpinned by an impressive trajectory of high-quality publications. Dr Gui’s initiative and emerging independence are in particular reflected in his contributions to substantial successful funding proposals.

it remains to say many congratulations!

Professor Edmund Rolls is pleased to announce the publication of his 15th book "Brain Computations: What and How" by Oxford University Press.

The aim of this book is to elucidate what is computed in different brain systems; and to describe current computational approaches and models of how each of these brain systems computes. Understanding the brain in this way has enormous potential for understanding ourselves better in health and in disease. Potential applications of this understanding are to the treatment of the brain in disease; and to artificial intelligence which will benefit from knowledge of how the brain performs many of its extraordinarily impressive functions.

This book is pioneering in taking this approach to brain function: to consider what is computed by many of our brain systems; and how it is computed. Details can be found here. Professor Rolls notes that the research described in this book has high impact in terms of citations (see here for more information).

Cancer Research UK is funding a study to examine the use of machine learning to assist pathologists and improve the early detection of oral cancer.

We are very excited to work on this project with Dr Khurram and his team at Sheffield. Early detection of cancer is a key focus area of research in our lab and this award by CRUK adds to the portfolio of research at the TIA lab on early detection of cancer.

The pilot project will pave the way towards the development of a tool that can help identify pre-malignant changes in oral dysplasia, crucial for the early detection of oral cancer. Successful completion of this project carries significant potential for saving lives and improving patient healthcare provision. -- Professor Nasir Rajpoot

The research is led by Dr Ali Khurram at the University of Sheffield with Professor Nasir Rajpoot from the University of Warwick as the co-Principal Investigator. Other co-investigators and collaborators include Professor Hisham Mehanna and Dr Paul Navkivell from the University of Birmingham and Dr Jacqueline James from Queen’s University Belfast.

Adam Shephard has just joined the department as a Research Fellow and is currently working in the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) Lab on the ANTICIPATE project funded by Cancer Research UK. He has recently submitted his thesis on the application of deep learning to paediatric MRI at Aston University, under the supervision of Prof. Amanda Wood and Dr. Jan Novak. His role in the ANTICIPATE project will be concerned with the development and application of deep learning techniques to digitized histology slides to aid in the more efficient grading of head and neck tumours, to ultimately provide more accurate patient prognoses.

Dr Criseida Zamora has joined the department to work together with Dr Yulia Timofeeva, Prof Kirill Volynski (UCL) and a number of other world-leading experimental laboratories on an MRC-funded project "Virtual presynaptic nerve terminal". This project aims to develop a unified computational modelling framework which will allow the neuroscience community to explore mechanisms of synaptic transmitter release that cannot be directly determined experimentally.

Criseida is a Bionic engineer working in the Systems Biology field. She received a PhD degree in Biomedical Engineering and Physics working on the analysis of biochemical noise in synthetic genetic circuits at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico. Her academic background and research experience have focused hitherto on building in silico models to study emergent properties of molecular systems to answer physiological questions. She has also worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan and the University of Bristol.

Dr Fayyaz Minhas of the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) lab at the Computer Science department is a co-PI on a £97K grant by Cancer Research UK’s Early Detection Committee to explore machine learning for discovery of pre-neoplastic signature in mesothelioma. He will be working closely with the PI Dr Jan Lukas Robertus, who is a Senior Consultant Cardiothoracic Pathologist at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Dr Minhas will lead on the machine learning and computational pathology side of the project.

In the current challenging context, a piece of excellent news: Dr Jane Sinclair and Dr Yulia Timofeeva have been promoted to Professor, effective from 1 June 2020. Quoting from their recommendations,

Dr Sinclair is an established educational leader in the department, the faculty, the university, nationally and internationally. Going far beyond development and delivery of teaching in the department, many of the main educational advances in Computer Science in recent years are due to Dr Sinclair, … Nationally and internationally, building on her excellent educational scholarship that has recently won a prestigious Best Paper Award, Dr Sinclair has shown sustained leadership in her work with ACM (the world’s computing society) as well as the leading national organisations Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC) and Computing At School (CAS), resulting in substantial impact on secondary and higher computing education in the UK and beyond.

and

Dr Timofeeva has an established international reputation for her research that spans several areas. Her recent successes with attracting external funding are impressive, including a £475K MRC grant and a major role in the £4.6M renewal of the MathSys CDT. … Dr Timofeeva has a strong track record of engaging with a variety of stakeholders in the context of her research field, through her editorial work, conference organisation, and visiting appointments. She has played a leading role in the UK Mathematical Neuroscience Network, which facilitates joint efforts by top UK researchers to tackle real-life problems. … One of the most collegiate and efficient Computer Science academics, Dr Timofeeva has had a large number of key administrative roles in the department and the MathSys CDT.

it remains to say many congratulations!