Departmental news

Fan Wang, a 4th year PhD student, has awarded a Hannan Graduate Student Travel Award by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She is the only UK-based recipient this year.

Seven papers authored by Computer Science researchers from Warwick have been accepted for publication at the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, one of the top three global venues for machine learning research, which will be held on 21-27 July 2024 in Vienna, Austria:

• Agent-Specific Effects: A Causal Effect Propagation Analysis in Multi-Agent MDPs, by Stelios Triantafyllou, Aleksa Sukovic, Debmalya Mandal, and Goran Radanovic
• Dynamic Facility Location in High Dimensional Euclidean Spaces, by Sayan Bhattacharya, Gramoz Goranci, Shaofeng Jiang, Yi Qian, and Yubo Zhang (Accepted as a spotlight, among the top 13 percent of all accepted papers)
• High-Dimensional Kernel Methods under Covariate Shift: Data-Dependent Implicit Regularization, by Yihang Chen, Fanghui Liu, Taiji Suzuki, and Volkan Cevher
• Revisiting character-level adversarial attacks, by Elias Abad Rocamora, Yongtao Wu, Fanghui Liu, Grigorios Chrysos, and Volkan Cevher
• Reward Model Learning vs. Direct Policy Optimization: A Comparative Analysis of Learning from Human Preferences, by Andi Nika, Debmalya Mandal, Parameswaran Kamalaruban, Georgios Tzannetos, Goran Radanovic, and Adish Singla
• To Each (Textual Sequence) Its Own: Improving Memorized-Data Unlearning in Large Language Models, by George-Octavian Bărbulescu and Peter Triantafillou
• Towards Neural Architecture Search through Hierarchical Generative Modeling, by Lichuan Xiang, Łukasz Dudziak, Mohamed Abdelfattah, Abhinav Mehrotra, Nicholas Lane, and Hongkai Wen

Science fiction meets science fact at the Royal Institution on May 4th, as Dr Alex Baker discusses the captivating inspiration real-world reactions have had on the Star Wars universe. bit.ly/4a4oyiw

Final year BSc Economics student Khushi Sampat coached Warwick's Quadball Team to triumph in all three competitions that took place this year.

Quadball is a full-contact mixed-gender sport that can be considered a mix of Netball, Dodgeball, and Rugby.

Khushi joined the Quadball Society in March 2022, took over as coach in April 2023, and was invited to join the Team England training squad in November 2023. There are three tournaments in a season that university teams take part in:

• Development Cup

• Southern England League/ Nothern England League

• British Quadball Cup (BQC)

Khushi celebrating a tournament win with a trophy

Khushi was happy to announce that “Warwick won all three tournaments this season and the commentators recognised the quality of coaching and gameplay!”

Outside of the university league, there are international competitions such as the European Games and World Cup which take place over the summer that Khushi hopes to take part in with the England Squad.

The Department would like to congratulate Khushi and the Warwick Quadball Team for this great success and all the hard work they have put in.

The image at the top of the article was taken in Sheffield during the British Quadball Cup on April 28th 2024. Khushi Sampat is third from left in the front row.

Dr Angela McShane, Department of History Honorary Reader, features in an episode of the History Extra podcast, produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.

As part of the '100 Ballads' project, Dr McShane and Professor Christopher Marsh have identified 100 of the biggest musical hits from 17th-century England. They speak to Charlotte Hodgman about the popularity of these broadside ballads and introduce some of the top singing stars of the day.

Listen here.

Professor Peter Marshall's new book "Storm’s Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney" was launched 11 April 2024. Storm's Edge is a magisterial history, a fascinating cultural study and a mighty attestation to the importance of placing the periphery at the centre. Britain is a nation composed of many different islands, but too often we focus on just one. This book offers a radical alternative, encouraging us to reorient the map and travel with Peter Marshall through landscapes of forgotten history.

For more information visit the Harper Collins website

'A surprising page-turner, full of humour and startling details' THE TIMES

'If I read a better history this year, I will be lucky' TOM HOLLAND

'An astonishing tour de force’ SPECTATOR

The 2024 Warwick Research Celebration Event saw three of our professors nominated for an award with Prof Chris Corre taking the Excellent Supervision Prize for the SEM Faculty.

Join us for a CRiSM workshop on Heterogeneous and Distributed Data from 10-12th June. Registration is free!

Two members of the Department are taking on leadership roles in the University’s Research Spotlight programme, a new programme designed to promote collaborative work on urgent global challenges.

Professor Daniel Sgroi has been appointed Chair of the new interdisciplinary Behaviour Spotlight, and Professor Thijs van Rens is a member of the leadership team for the Health Spotlight.

A total of six interdisciplinary ‘Research Spotlights’ have been created. Each of them identifies a major global challenge: “They are all serious interdisciplinary areas that are going to make a big difference,” Daniel explains. “The University has asked, ‘what are the big issues facing the world?’ and decided to put a spotlight on each of them and bring people from every department together to work on them.

“This is important because most of the world’s big problems are problems that can only really be solved by disciplines working together – for example, how we deal with climate change, how we tackle political polarisation, how we handle pandemics.

“We know from COVID that medics worked with behavioural scientists so that they didn’t just develop vaccines, they developed strategies to ensure people would take them.

“Our Behaviour Spotlight aims to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration between behavioural researchers that seek to understand and address some of the biggest problems faced by the world today.

“We can provide seed funding for pilot experiments or to kick-start projects, we can create and financially support new seminar series, workshops and conferences, and help fund early-stage research.

“We have a big network already, inherited from the Behaviour, Brain & Society GRP, but we now want to reach across the whole university. We’ll be inviting anyone doing behavioural research at Warwick to join us as part of our mission to build a university-wide network of active researchers.”

A new Health Spotlight has also been created. Professor Thijs van Rens is one of four academics on the leadership team. He said:

"There are many people at University working on research that is relevant to health, at Warwick Medical School, of course, but also in Business, Chemistry, Economics, Engineering, English, History, Mathematics, Physics, Psychology, Statistics and probably other departments as well.

“Our aim is to build the network and infrastructure to bring these people together so that together we can make better progress on the big questions that cannot be addressed from a single discipline.

“Some of the interdisciplinary areas that we will focus on are technologies in health, prevention and public health, mental health and wellbeing, and interdisciplinary methodologies. Warwick has strengths in all of these areas, and we hope that by providing a supportive environment for collaboration, we can further build on these strengths and encourage ‘blue-skies’ research ideas.”

“My own research on healthy and sustainable diets has made me realise how the quality of the research can benefit from an interdisciplinary team, and how much it helps to secure funding for that research."

Professor Ben Lockwood, Head of the Economics Department, said “I am delighted that Daniel and Thijs have been appointed to these leadership roles and will be contributing to the University’s ambitious interdisciplinary research programme.”

The Spotlight programme is intended to run for at least 10 years and is an indication of the University’s long-term commitment to world-changing research.

 FIND OUT MORE

• Behaviour Spotlight : Behaviour | Research at Warwick
• Health Spotlight: Health | Research at Warwick