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.

We are delighted to announce that one of our recent graduates has been awarded The University’s Outstanding Student Contribution Award (OSCA) for 2023.

The inaugural Eutopia Summer School on the history of violence is taking place at TU Dresden from 2-8 July 2023. The school is aimed primarily at undergraduates about to enter their final year of study and will enable exploration of themes such as:

• Historiography of Violence
• Gendered Violence
• Colonial Violence
• Violence in Political Discourse
• Representing Violence
• Drink-Related Violence

Born out of the longstanding relationship between Warwick and Dresden, the summer school is run by scholars from both institutions, providing students access to world-class research and teaching. An amazing opportunity and we wish them well this week!

When you purchase an IP-based spy (hidden) camera for surveillance, are you aware that others may be spying on what you are watching? Recent research by Samuel Herodotou in the Department of Computer Science, Warwick, as part of his third-year undergraduate dissertation project under the supervision of Professor Feng Hao, has revealed a wide range of vulnerabilities of a generic camera module that has been used in many best-selling hidden cameras. Exploiting these vulnerabilities, an attacker may capture your hidden camera's video/audio streams from anywhere in the world, and furthermore, take complete control of the camera as a bot to attack other devices in your home network. To launch the attack, all the attacker needs to know is merely your hidden camera’s serial number. It is estimated that these vulnerabilities affect millions of hidden cameras, mostly sold in America, Europe and Asia. The (insecure) peer-to-peer network that is used by the affected cameras is also being used by 50 million IoT devices as a general communication platform. Hence, many millions of other IoT devices may also be affected. Researchers have responsibly disclosed findings to the manufacturers, and a CVE has already been assigned. Samuel will present this research work at the 17th International Conference on Network and System Security (Canterbury, UK, 14-16 August 2023). More details can be found in the paper.

Xaymaca Awoyungbo, a final year undergraduate student studying History at Warwick, has written an article for Lacuna magazine. Xaymaca speaks with author Sandra A Agard and explores Britain’s young Black creative networks.

You can read the full piece here.

Emma Tetsill, who studied on our Law 3 year LLB degree and graduated in 2022, has written a touching story titled 'My Grandad and Covid - with underlying health conditions in care home, his life was no less valuable'. The heartfelt piece was recently published by our Lacuna Magazine and addresses the tragic human cost of the pandemic and government neglect.

In the next feature in our series focusing on our undergraduate entrepreneurs, we meet the team behind Butterfly, a new app taking flight on campus.

Alex Reid, Zain Mobarik and Josh Okusi (pictured above, left to right) are a team with an ambitious vision – they plan to “put the social back into social media” with their app, Butterfly.

Second year Economics student Alex and his friends were workshopping ideas for a new sorting algorithm Josh had developed. They realised that they had a bigger vision than simply ranking undergraduates according to their popularity – why not make an app that would help to bring digital friendships off the screen and into the real world?

Alex explains: “We all felt that social media has lost its way – far from being social, these days it is about passive scrolling and the consumption of entertainment, often far removed from our own day to day lives.

“We decided to create a social media app that is grounded in our community, with all the content shared on the app being relevant to the real lives of its users – and which puts the focus on enabling friendships in the real world.”

Butterfly is only available to users with a Warwick student email, which keeps the content grounded in the realities of campus life. As well as creating their profile pages – the Butterfly ‘Flashcard,’ – and posting thoughts and confessions, users can chat with their course-mates or explore societies and campus events before deciding to attend, taking a bit of the anxiety out of trying something new.

Regular giveaways and prizes keep the community engaged, and there are perks for registered users such as discounts. Alex says “We now have over 60 discounts at partner stores, exclusive to Butterfly users. Our partners now include Kasbah, Tenpin, Phat Buns, Royal Pug, and Boom Battle Bar Coventry.”

“We also have a fantastic partnership with Benugo,” Alex added. “Butterfly users can get 10 per cent off anything on the menu and we ran a competition last year where the app’s most enthusiastic users won a free meal with a plus one. That really captured our ethos of supporting students to grow their real-life friendships.”

Commenting on the app, first year student Sofia said: “Butterfly has completely changed my university experience at Warwick. It has built my confidence and encouraged me to go to loads of events.”

Since its launch in September last year Butterfly has been downloaded 3,000 times. Its creators have won Warwick’s Student Enterprise Competition and been accepted onto Google’s Startups for Cloud Programme.

The app is available in the App StoreLink opens in a new window and Google PlayLink opens in a new window .

First year LLB students Siara Parveen and Charlotte Neal, successfully completed the regional semi-final of the Student Client Interviewing Competition (CIC) held in Sheffield earlier this month. “It was definitely unexpected, but we are both really proud of ourselves [...and] absolutely delighted.”