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

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

On Tuesday 16th April, Professor Chapman was presented her award at the annual EGU meeting in Vienna with over 15,000 people in attendance. Sandra also gave a lecture titled ‘Multiscale matters: when coupling across multiple scales drives the dynamics of solar system plasmas.’

A new research project launched today by a partnership including the University of Warwick will explore how shoppers can be encouraged to make more sustainable food choices while they do their online shopping.

The online shopping project is part of the SALIENT food trials, a consortium of eight universities and two research institutes looking at ways to support healthier eating and reduce the impact of food on the planet, funded by the UK government through the ESRC.

The trial is facilitated by a web browser extension for the online grocery platform of a major UK supermarket, which will pull information from a database of over 14,000 ‘life cycle assessments’ for the available products compiled by food sustainability experts Sustained.

Up to 2750 UK shoppers will be recruited to take part in up to five waves. They will be invited to download a plug-in for their internet browser which will provide two sorts of nudges to help guide their purchases:-

• Eco-labelling: these will inform online shoppers about the environmental footprint of their food choices, using an A (least impact) to G (most impact) rating system.
• Product Swaps: shoppers may be shown products with a lower environmental impact and equal or better nutritional profile, in place of their initial choices. These may also be made available at a discount to test the effect of lower prices on purchase decisions.

The researchers will evaluate the impact of these interventions on the environmental rating of consumers’ shopping baskets, to understand whether either intervention results in more sustainable shopping habits and by how much.

Professor Thijs van Rens, co-lead of the Sustained trial, said: “Offering swaps and price discounts are promising ways to get people to buy more sustainable foods, which are often better for their health too. But we have very little evidence for how effective these interventions are, particularly for online grocery shopping.

“Previous research has mostly focused on physical supermarkets or on simulated online supermarkets. But we know that people often make quite different choices in real life than in simulated environments.

“Our collaboration with Sustained will provide a great opportunity to generate real life data which we can analyse in order to recommend policies with the best chance of changing behaviour in a positive way.”

Professor Oyinlola Oyebode, also co-lead of the research trial, said: “Climate change and environmental degradation are important and serious challenges for human health. Changing the food we produce, buy and eat can help to address this, and more sustainable food often offers direct benefits for health too.”

Carl Oliver, Sustained CEO, said: “Empowering more sustainable purchasing choices is part of the journey to reducing the massive impact the global food system has on the environment.

“This trial is also about understanding how industry and policy makers can utilise technology partners like Sustained to shape a food system that supports the health of us and our planet.

“This is an exciting partnership for Sustained as we work towards our vision of helping consumers and businesses reduce their environmental impact through actionable intelligence and collaboration.”

About SALIENT: SALIENT is a team of researchers working with the public, partners from local and national government, food charities, community support teams, and the food industry, with the goal of designing interventions to support healthier eating and reduce the impact of food on the planet. The SALIENT consortium is drawn from eight universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick, Birmingham, Hertfordshire, Liverpool, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Queen Mary University of London) and two research institutes (Nesta and the Behavioural Insights Team). https://www.salientfoodtrials.uk/

We are thrilled to share that Dr Hyo Yoon Kang, Reader/Associate Professor at Warwick Law School has been awarded the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for the next academic year.

Delegating tax-and-spend powers to local government risks limiting the ability of local authorities to respond to environmental disasters, according to new research published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

Dr Jose Rowell Corpuz (University of Warwick), Professor Joseph Capuno (University of the Philippines Diliman) and Dr Samuel Lordemus (University of Lucerne) looked at 10 years of public finance data from the Philippines both before and after a national emergency in 2013, when Typhoon Haiyan struck the islands with 200mph winds, to explore how local public finances respond to natural disasters.

The researchers also looked for evidence of how central government disaster relief funds and international aid affected local revenue raising and spending on essential services – did the external aid compensate for lower local revenues, or was it genuinely additional to existing resources?

While these questions have been studied in better-off countries, it is believed that this study substantially adds to the analysis of the local fiscal response to natural disasters in a country with more limited financial resources.

The Philippines is in a high-risk typhoon area, and Typhoon Haiyan was one of the strongest ever recorded and caused unprecedented damage as it crossed the country. Official government sources estimate that about 6,300 people died, more than 28,000 were injured and 4 million left homeless.

It displaced communities and affected the regions' infrastructure, roads, hospitals, schools, and public services. The severity of the impact on the areas it ravaged was unanticipated and unprecedented, with its effects felt during and after the disaster.

Using data on local government revenue and spending from before and after Typhoon Haiyan, Dr Corpuz and his co-authors found:

• The typhoon had a small impact on local government revenue raising. In the short term there was a fall in income from taxes and charges on local businesses but these recovered after around two years. This effect was more severe in less-well-off municipalities and highlights the importance of flexible central government support to address economic inequality.
• The typhoon had a small but measurable impact on spending. Local governments spent slightly less on all areas of responsibility except health, housing and labour. They also reduced their debt repayments.
• Local governments which received external aid did not diminish their tax collection efforts and spent more on public services, education, social and economic services, and debt repayments. This result shows that foreign aid has a vital role to play in supporting local government to help citizens in the aftermath of disasters.

Commenting on his research Dr Corpuz said:

“The effects of natural disasters can have a huge impact on a local economy and under decentralisation, local governments are limited in the resources they can mobilise in the aftermath.

“Ordinarily, local tax revenue collection provides a higher rate of local government spending over and above central government transfers. This changes after a natural disaster when there are significant losses in revenues particularly from local businesses and economic enterprise.

“When a typhoon as powerful as Haiyan affects the generating revenue capacity of local governments, central government transfers and foreign aid are crucial to maintaining public expenditures that benefit its people.”

Specifically, the research evidence suggests:

• Local governments exposed to common nationwide shocks such as Typhoon Haiyan have limited capacity to reallocate or provide additional resources that would address the increased demand for local public spending.
• Lack of strong and responsive financial support from central government leaves local governments to fend for themselves. This situation only escalates the impact of external shocks.
• Central government needs to step in with additional sources of funding for disaster relief and ensure a coordinated effort with other funding sources (such as foreign aid) to effectively target the most vulnerable communities.

Dr Corpuz concludes:

“Although we cannot generalize, the Philippine case is a reminder of natural disasters’ debilitating effect on local governments and vulnerable communities. We hope that our study will inspire many in ensuring a well-coordinated disaster risk management by central and local governments, particularly in settings of decentralised local government finance.”

Read the full research paper: Natural disasters and local government finance: Evidence from Typhoon Haiyan

Congratulations to Professor Don Pollacco who has just been awarded £3 million from the ERC to develop a ‘digital telescope’ that will be capable of producing a highly sensitive continuous movie of the night sky.

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