Departmental news

The 100 ballads website has won the prestigious Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History, awarded by the American Historical Association. Dr Angela McShane, Department of History Honorary Reader, and Professor Christopher Marsh, Queens University Belfast, identified 100 of the biggest musical hits from 17th-century England in the '100 Ballads' project.

Visit the 100 ballads website.

Dr McShane and Prof Marsh will be attending the awards ceremony in New York on 3 January 2025. Congratulations to everyone involved in the project!

American Historical Association Announces 2024 Prize Winners – AHA

https://x.com/AHAhistorians/status/1848367144108462091

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.