Departmental news

Mustafa Yasir, a former Warwick Department of Computer Science student who graduated in Summer 2023, wrote up and presented an academic paper on the work carried out as part of his third year project. The paper was accepted to the 3rd Annual Workshop on Graph Learning Benchmarks at KDD 2023, and was presented in California by Mustafa.

Mustafa's third year project idea, supervised by Dr Long Tran-Thanh and titled 'Extending the Graph Generation Models of GraphWorld', started whilst he was interning at Google last summer. Mustafa contacted some researchers at the company working in the Graph ML space, to ask for any relevant project ideas. He bumped into a team who had just published GraphWorld: a tool to change the way Graph Neural Networks are benchmarked, by creating synthetic graph datasets through graph generation models – as opposed to using real-world datasets that are limited in their generalisability and present a major issue facing the field of Graph Learning.

However, since GraphWorld only used a single graph generation model in this process, Mustafa integrated two additional models with the system, ran large-scale GNN benchmarking experiments with these models and published his code to Google’s official GraphWorld repository. The project provides a significant advancement to researchers across the field looking to benchmark models and guide the development of new architectures.

Dr Long Tran-Thanh commented:

What Mustafa and the GraphWorld team has been working on is very important for the machine learning and AI research communities. In particular, there has been a vocal criticism against the whole field that most models are trained on the same public datasets (e.g., ImageNet, MNIST, etc), therefore are not diverse enough. One way to mitigate this issue is to generate realistically looking synthetic data. This need is especially of importance in within the graph learning community. GraphWorld’s aim is to address this exact problem by creating a powerful and convenient tool that can generate a diverse set of graphs, ranging from large social network-style graphs to molecule-inspired ones. Joining this project with the Google researchers is a huge opportunity for Warwick students to participate in a very impactful project.

Final year Physics Undergraduate project students and their project supervisor, Professor Sandra Chapman at the University of Warwick have collaborated with researchers at John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (USA) to develop a new ‘data change’ flag.

The University of Warwick and Monash University invite applications for the position of doctoral researcher (PhD candidate) within the field of Computational Mechanics. The selected candidate is expected to undertake innovative research in the areas of advanced computational solid/structural mechanics, particularly within the context of civil and/or mechanical engineering.

Over 70% of properties held via overseas shell companies (109,000 out of 152,000 properties) still do not publish information about who really owns them, despite government commitments to crack down on anonymous ownership of UK property.

A new report – released on the day Parliament returns to debate the Economic Crime Bill – finds that for 35% of properties owned via overseas shell companies (54,000 out of 152,000), even law enforcement agencies do not know the true identities of the properties’ beneficial owners. In 10% of cases (15,000 properties), the company is missing from the Register altogether, and in a further 25%, (39,000 properties) essential information has not been reported.

Catch me if you can: Gaps in the Register of Overseas EntitiesLink opens in a new window highlights that these gaps are overwhelmingly due to design flaws in the Register of Overseas Entities, which was introduced in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine with a pledge to “require anonymous foreign owners of UK property to reveal their real identities to ensure criminals cannot hide behind secretive chains of shell companies”. It finds that:

• An overwhelming 87% of cases where the researchers found that beneficial ownership information was missing or inaccessible to the public, was due to deliberate choices by government to keep the information out of scope of the legislation, rather than rule-breaking by overseas companies.
• Rule-breaking accounts for only 6-9% of cases.
• Another 4-7% comes from out-of-date or poorly documented records.

On Monday 4th Sept, the House of Commons will consider Lords’ amendments to the Economic Crime Bill, aimed at closing some of these loopholes, but the government is currently opposing these.

The new analysis, by researchers from the London School of Economics (LSE), the University of Warwick, and the Centre for Public Data, combines data from Companies House and HM Land Registry to quantify the scale of the missing information, and the reasons behind it.

The biggest reason for missing or inaccessible information on beneficial owners is the use of trusts. These account for an astonishing 63% of all properties where beneficial owners are hidden from the public (69,000 out of 108,000). An amendment to the Economic Crime Bill proposed by Lord Agnew – who last year resigned from government over its failure to tackle corruption – would shut this loophole but is being opposed by the government.

The report also highlights that flaws in the register of owners of UK companies – known as the ‘PSC Register’ – could also be facilitating corruption. Currently, nominees and trustees owning shares are not required to tell Companies House who they are acting for. The government is opposing an amendment by Lord Vaux that would bring transparency to these arrangements.

The report makes ten recommendations that the government could adopt to close the gaps identified.

Read the full working paper

Catch me if you can: Gaps in the Register of Overseas EntitiesLink opens in a new window, by Arun AdvaniLink opens in a new window (Associate Professor, University of Warwick, CAGE), Cesar, Poux (LSE International Inequalities Institute), Anna Powell-Smith (Visiting Fellow, LSE, Director of Centre for Public Data) and Andy Summers (Associate Professor, LSE Law, CAGE Associate).

CAGELink opens in a new window is a research centre based in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, conducting independent-policy driven research informed by history, culture and behaviour.

Related articles

• Five ways kleptocrats can keep hold of their UK assetsLink opens in a new window, by Dr Arun Advani,The Guardian, 4 September 2023
• Owners of 100,000 properties held by foreign shell companies unknown despite new UK lawsLink opens in a new window, by Jasper Jolly in The Guardian, 3 September 2023
• Most offshore owners reman a mysteryLink opens in a new window, by Andrew Ellson in The Times (paywall), 4 September 2023

During National Organic Month, the University of Warwick's Crop Centre takes a pioneering stance in the realm of low-input farming, shedding light on the concept of 'organic farming.'

Press Release (1 September 2023)

Congratulations to Dr Joy Malala, Assistant Professor at Warwick Law School who has been awarded Warwick's Research Development Fund (RDF) Strategic Award to support her project titled, ‘Between Life and Debt: Minding the Dignity Gap in the UK Consumer Credit Market’.

The future of farming could involve robots– as farmers seek to address labour shortages and increase crop yields.

Warwick Crop Centre and WMG are working in close collaboration to combine their robotics expertise and plant science expertise to investigate how they can apply autonomous robotics to greenhouses and croppable fields.

Press Release (25 August 2023)

15 students joined the ‘Coding with Sophie’ launch session at Limbrick Wood Primary School after school club, and completed their six session programme just before the summer holidays.

The ‘Coding with Sophie’ programme has been developed by Dr Rebecca Nealon and Dr Farzana Meru, with the aim to improve coding literacy and to inspire children to consider coding (and more broadly STEM) in their future, as well as empowering teachers and parents to support children in their coding journey.

A team from the Astronomy and Astrophysics group led by Dr Lauren Doyle attended the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham in June and were one of the most popular stands with students returning again and again to engage with their stall.

The future of farming could involve robots– as farmers seek to address labour shortages and increase crop yields.

Researchers at WMG at The University of Warwick are investigating how they can apply autonomous robotics to greenhouses and croppable fields.

Continuous and repetitive monitoring of crops is vital for fruit and veg production, as the sooner that pests, diseases and infrastructure issues can be spotted, the sooner they can be rectified.

This means that growers get the information they need to make quick decisions that save their crops and reduce losses.

A state-of-the-art Crop Monitoring Robot (Crombot) is proving that robots could become the perfect helper to support growers – especially when faced with labour shortages. Crombot is an autonomous four-wheeled robot, able to navigate itself around a green house, avoiding other workers and even following specific workers on command.

Crombot’s robotic arm has a camera on the end which allows it to carry out all the required monitoring duties, and can even identify the ripeness levels of strawberries, letting the grower know which areas of the greenhouse is ready to be picked.

Other developments by the group include "Spot", an autonomous four-legged robot dog supplied by Boston Dynamics, for use in agriculture. Spot is designed to work in difficult and hazardous environments, and this innovative robot system has proven itself so far to be very impressive in handling a variety of greenhouse and outdoor environments.

Benefits of this system include being able to walk up and down steps, over heating rails and other obstacles as well as tackling muddy fields.

By working in close collaboration with the University’s School of Life Sciences (SLS) at the Warwick Crop Centre on the Innovation Campus Stratford-upon-Avon, the WMG team have been able to combine their robotics expertise with the plant science expertise of SLS to create this extremely promising research.

This has laid the foundation for the group to now explore new capabilities such as automated planting and harvesting.

Harry Boyce, Project Engineer at WMG at the University of Warwick added: “Our research with Crombot aims to address growers’ scepticism of new technology and, most importantly, cost. It will unlock the potential for adoption of robotics solutions in horticulture, and facilitate a UK offering to a huge global market.

Alex Keller, Principal Engineer at WMG at the University of Warwick, said: “Boston Dynamic’s Spot robot could be an ideal solution for an agricultural monitoring robot, but it is currently very expensive and further research is needed to understand if Spot could progress to challenges such as harvesting and more.

“This is why we are continuing to develop our in-house robotic capabilities, so that we can help industry to create robotic solutions that are affordable and realistic for the grower, which still deliver high impact and high return on investment.

“We hope to hear from growers who would like to be involved in this research – finding out how they can incorporate robots in their practices too.”

Find out more about WMG here https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wmg/ or contact wmgbusiness@warick.ac.uk.

Notes to Editors

University of Warwick press office contact:

Annie Slinn

Communications Officer | Press & Media Relations | University of Warwick

Email: annie.slinn@warwick.ac.uk