Computer Science News
Latest academic promotions
We are happy to announce five promotions in the department, with effect from 1st August 2023.
- Dr James Archbold has been promoted to Associate Professor (Teaching Focussed)
- Dr Richard Kirk has been promoted to Assistant Professor (Teaching Focussed)
- Dr Claire Rocks has been promoted to Reader (Teaching Focussed)
- Dr Ian Saunders has been promoted to Associate Professor (Teaching Focussed)
- Dr Sathya Subramanian has been promoted to Assistant Professor (Research Focussed)
Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!
Promotion to Assistant Professor
We are happy to share the news that Dr Alex Dixon has been promoted to the position of Assistant Professor, effective from 1 May 2023. Alex joined our department as a Teaching Fellow in September 2021, while still completing his PhD research. Despite juggling both roles, he has made significant contributions to the department's activities. Many congratulations to Alex for his accomplishments in completing his PhD research and for earning this well-deserved promotion.
Amina Asif joins the department as a Teaching Fellow
We are happy to announce that Dr Amina Asif has joined the Department of Computer Science as a Teaching Fellow. Amina has previously worked with us as part of the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) centre, where her research focussed on weak supervision and model robustness in Computational Pathology. We welcome her to the department!
Prof. Adi Shamir receives Honorary Doctorate from Warwick
(Weizmann Institute of Science), the world-renowned cryptographer and a recipient of the 2002 (the highest honour in computer science received jointly with and ), visited our campus in January 2023 to collect an Honorary Doctorate from the 神马福利影片. During his visit, Prof. Shamir gave also a research talk at the DIMAP seminar and CS Colloquium entitled "Efficient Detection of High Probability Cryptanalytic Properties of Boolean Functions."
Prof. Shamir has been known in Warwick since 1976, when he spent a year as a post-doc with our own . Directly after Warwick Prof. Shamir went to MIT, where together with Adleman and Rivest he invented the famous RSA public-key cryptography algorithm for encoding and decoding messages, used nowadays by millions to securely transmit messages over the internet. The work on RSA has been immensely influential and led to the 2002 A.M. Turing Award for the three co-inventors, cited for the 鈥渋ngenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice.鈥� Other noticeable awards (for RSA and other numerous contributions to cryptography and computing) received by Prof. Shamir include the 2000 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, the Israel Mathematical Union Erd艖s Prize in Mathematics (1983), the Vatican Pontifical Academy PIUS XI Gold Medal (1992), the Association for Computing Machinery Paris Kannellakis Theory and Practice Award (1996), the Israel Prize in Computer Science (2008), and the Japan Prize in the field of electronics, information, and technology (2017), and the Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2018).
Complexity breakthrough by Dr Shuichi Hirahara
Dr Shuichi Hirahara, a research fellow affiliated with the Theory and FoundationsLink opens in a new window group and an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, has made a significant advance towards our understanding of the limits and possibilities of efficient computations. In his recent paper "", published at the 63rd IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2022), Dr Hirahara established the NP-hardness of learning efficient programs and of estimating the circuit complexity of an explicitly given partial Boolean function. The main result of the paper addresses a question that dates back to the pioneering work of Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin on the theory of NP-completeness from the 1970s.
The new result has been presented at several institutions, including UT Austin, Columbia University, Warwick (), MIT, and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley. The latter is running a semester-long program on "" that is closely related to Hirahara's recent contributions.
You can read more about it at the popular Computational Complexity Blog, where the discovery has been named "" (see also ).
Outstanding MSc students
The department would like to congratulate our 2021-2022 MSc students on their end-of-year results. Additional congratulations go to the following outstanding students, who have been awarded academic prizes:
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Dr Igor Oliveira awarded an ERC Starting Grant
The European Research Council (ERC) has announced that is among the winners of its prestigious Starting Grant competition. According to the European Research Council: "The funding is worth in total 鈧�636 million and is part of the Horizon Europe programme. It will help excellent younger scientists, who have 2 to 7 years鈥� experience after their PhDs, to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas."
has been awarded a 鈧�1.5M ERC Starting grant for a 5-year project entitled "Synergies Between Complexity and Learning". The project aims to exchange ideas and techniques between Complexity Theory and Learning Theory to accelerate progress in both fields, broaden the arsenal of tools available to attack their open problems, as well as to obtain a deeper understanding of the nature of efficient computation and of its logical aspects.
Two projects in Computer Science and Informatics (PE6 panel) in the United Kingdom were awarded ERC Starting Grants in the 2022 round. The contains more information about the ERC funding programme.