We are happy to announce five promotions in the department, with effect from 1st August 2023.

• Dr James Archbold has been promoted to Associate Professor (Teaching Focussed)
• Dr Richard Kirk has been promoted to Assistant Professor (Teaching Focussed)
• Dr Claire Rocks has been promoted to Reader (Teaching Focussed)
• Dr Ian Saunders has been promoted to Associate Professor (Teaching Focussed)
• Dr Sathya Subramanian has been promoted to Assistant Professor (Research Focussed)

Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!

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 Harita Dellaporta for receiving the Best Paper Award at the premier conference in Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2022 for her paper on Robust Bayesian Inference for Simulator-based Models via the MMD Posterior Bootstrap.

We are delighted to report that Dr Long Tran-Thanh has received a AIJ Prominent Paper Award for his first-authored paper, Efficient crowdsourcing of unknown experts using bounded multi-armed bandits, published in 2014 at Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), a premier journal in the field of artificial intelligence. The AIJ Prominent Paper Award recognises outstanding papers published in the journal in the last seven years that are exceptional in their significance and impact.

The paper developed the first comprehensive framework for the rigorous and principled mathematical analysis of task allocation algorithms in crowdsourcing systems. In addition, the paper proposed bounded bandits, a new sequential decision making model to solve task allocation problems with resource constraints. The work has had a significant impact on subsequent work carried out in both industry and academia. The award will be presented at IJCAI 2021, a top tier international conference in artificial intelligence.

We are pleased to report that Dr Simon Graham, Senior Research Fellow from the Department of Computer Science, has received a SEM Faculty Thesis Prize.

Each year, the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine (SEM) funds a prize for the best PhD/EngD thesis in each of its ten departments. Each department nominates a winner out of the applications received after a judging process as determined by the Faculty.

Dr Simon Graham commented regarding his award:

My research focussed on the development of computational tools for the automatic analysis of digitised cancerous tissue samples. Now, I am continuing my research in the area of computational pathology and soon hope to see it utilised in a clinical setting, where it may help improve cancer recognition and treatment planning. I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Nasir Rajpoot and all my collaborators within the Tissue Image Analytics Centre and at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire for their support during my PhD.

We are delighted to announce that Dr Long Tran-Thanh has been awarded funding and support from Google’s AI for Social Good program.

The program focusses on using AI to address some of the world’s biggest societal challenges. Dr. Tran-Thanh’s project, titled Incentive Engineering and Truthful Mechanisms for Grassland Quality and Local Market Price Estimation in Africa, will address the problem of holistic grazing and pasture management in East Africa. The main objectives of the project are: (i) to identify the most efficient ways to evaluate the overall quality of different grazing areas; (ii) to develop a user friendly recommendation system that chooses the next best grazing areas for pastoralists, that takes into account the holistic aspect of pasture management; and (iii) to incentivise pastoralists to truthfully report their activities in order to further improve the system’s predictive ability. The project is a collaboration between the University of Warwick and AfriScout.

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!

Prof. Yulan He and Prof. Rob Procter have been awarded funding from the EPSRC under the UKRI’s COVID-19 call. During the COVID-19 pandemic, national and international organisations are using social media and online platforms to communicate information about the virus to the public. However, propagation of misinformation has also become prevalent. This can strongly influence human behaviour and negatively impact public health interventions, so it is vital to detect misinformation in a timely manner. This project aims to develop machine learning algorithms for automatic collection of external evidence relating to COVID-19 and assessment of veracity of claims.

The project is in collaboration with Prof. Maria Liakata and Dr. Arkaitz Zubiaga from the Queen Mary University of London.

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.

Warwick's Department of Computer Science has been awarded a new research grant to develop a machine learning solution for dynamic forecasting of available capacity on road networks. The developed software is planned to be integrated within the TfWM's Regional Transport Coordination Centre for adaptive route planning and traffic management mitigation against disruptions, incidents and roadworks.

The “5G Enabled Dynamic Network Capacity Manager” project is in collaboration with commercial partners, Blacc, Immense, one.network, and O2. The team has won the WM5G’s transport competition to leverage 5G networks for near real-time AI based modelling.

Prof. Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu is leading the development of the scalable ML solution to forecast residual capacities in a dynamic spatio-temporal graph. The solution is designed to benefit from high-granular and low-latency data feeds from 5G cellular and sensor data enabling congestion to be accurately monitored, modelled, and predicted.