Departmental news

Congratulations to Dr Katy Stokes, a graduate of the MRC DTP programme, who recently published a policy brief with Baroness Natalie Bennett urging the responsible use of biocides in consumer goods.

This briefingLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window will accompany the introduction of a Consumer Products (Control of Biocides) Bill in the House of Lords, which focuses on safeguarding public health and the environment. To achieve this Katy undertook an internship with the British Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (BASC)’s Parliamentary Internship Programme.

A paperLink opens in a new window co-authored by Arpan MukhopadhyayLink opens in a new window has received the Best Paper Award at ACM Mobihoc 2024Link opens in a new window. Mobihoc is a premier international conference on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing. The other authors in the paper are Samira Ghanbarian (uWaterloo), Ravi R. Mazumdar (uWaterloo), and Fabrice Guillemin (Orange Labs, France).

The paper addresses the problem of optimally allocating processors to parallelisable tasks having arbitrary concave speed-up functions. In general, determining the optimal number of processors to allocate to each task in an online fashion is a hard problem since allocating too many processors to one job will make those processors unavailable to other jobs whereas allocating too few processors will result in a small speed-up for the job. The paper proposes a simple randomised algorithm for determining the optimal number of processors to allocate to each job without requiring preemption (or repacking). It shows that the proposed algorithm is asymptotically optimal as the number of processors becomes large (which is often the case in modern clouds) and is also robust to variations in the job size distribution. This is the first time such an algorithm has been found in the literature.

We are excited to be involved in the STEM Connect programme in which the University is reimagining the future of STEM at Warwick by investing £425m into our new Science and Engineering precinct. Find out more.

Writing Wrongs is a writing programme for local year 12 and year 13 students which supports young writers from widening participation backgrounds to explore issues related to social justice and to improve their storytelling and writing skills. The deadline for applications is Thursday 28 November 2024.

Neha Rino, a PhD student in the Theory and Foundations group in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Cyber Security group at WMG, has won an Oded Maler award at FORMATS 2024.

The Oded Maler award is a distinction presented for the best paper of the International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems (FORMATS). This year's edition of the conference was held in September in Calgary, Canada, jointly with QEST (International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems) as a common research forum dedicated to quantitative modelling, analysis, and verification.

Neha's paper, "Efficiently Computable Distance-Based Robustness for a Practical Fragment of STL", is co-authored with Mohammed Foughali and Eugene Asarin, both from Université Paris Cité and IRIF in Paris, France, where Neha completed the Master's degree (ENS Paris-Saclay) prior to joining Warwick.

Neha's paper contributes to the research framework of quantitative monitoring, which is the analysis of individual executions of systems which yields numerical output (real numbers), rather than binary yes/no. The paper formulates and solves, by an efficient algorithm, a new problem of this kind: computing a real number that characterises to which extent the given execution of a real-time system satisfies its specification expressed in Signal Temporal Logic (STL).

Gengyu Xue, a third year PhD student, has been recently announced as one of the 17 recipients of the IMS 2024 ICSDS Student Travel Award. She is the only UK based recipient this year.

We are delighted to announce that Sascha Becker, Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics, has been elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

Professor Becker becomes one of the 42 new Fellows from six regions of the world who have been recognised for their contribution to Economics. Since its foundation in 1930, the Econometric Society have appointed 1,187 fellows.

The Econometrics Society is an international society for the advancement of economic theory in its relation to statistics and mathematics. It publishes important economic journals: Econometrica, Quantitative Economics, Theoretical Economics as well as the Monograph Series. It also organises annual scientific meetings in six regions of the world and a World Congress once every five years.

Professor Sascha Becker commented about his achievement:

“I was super happy to receive the news about being elected Fellow of the Econometric Society. The co-founders of the Society, Josef Schumpeter and Ragnar Frisch, in their “Memorandum re the Econometric Society” wrote in 1931: “We are of the opinion that the list of fellows should be very restricted. As a rule, a fellow ought to unite in the same person both the economic, the statistical and the mathematical point of view. “

I am extremely grateful to have been deemed worthy of joining the ranks of such an amazing group of Fellows. Many of them inspired me on my journey as an economist, after having started my studies in mathematics and physics.”

Head of Department, Professor Ben Lockwood said:

“I was very pleased to hear of Sascha’s news and I congratulate him on this achievement. Sascha joins the other Fellows of the Econometric Society in the Department: Bhaskar Dutta, Roger Farmer, Peter Hammond, Motty Perry, Herakles Polemarchakis, Debraj Ray, Eric Renault and Ken Wallis. This means that with nine Fellows, we are in the fourth position in the UK (behind only LSE, Oxford and UCL) in the number of Fellows in Departments of Economics.”

We congratulate Professor Sascha Becker and wish him further successes in the future.