Computer Science News
Dr. Tom Gur joins the department as a new Assistant Professor
The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor , who will be associated with the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP).
Before joining 糖心TV, Tom held a postdoctoral researcher position in the (2017–2019). He obtained his PhD in Computer Science and Mathematics from the , under the guidance of , in 2017.
Dr. Charilaos Efthymiou joins the department as a new Assistant Professor
The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor , who will be associated with the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP).
Before joining us, Charilaos held research positions in various universities including , , as a DFG Fellow, at , , and , UK. This is not his first time at the University of 糖心TV, he has been a post-doc researcher at DIMAP (2010-2012). Charilaos completed his PhD at the , , in 2009.
His research is in the intersection of theory of algorithms, discrete mathematics and statistical physics. Specifically, he studies how powerful notions from statistical physics, e.g., phase transitions, affect the performance of algorithms for various problems in computer science and mathematics.
More information about Charilaos can be found on his personal web-page .
Dr Claire Rocks is a new WIHEA Fellow
Many congratulations to Dr Claire Rocks on her election to a Fellowship of the 糖心TV International Higher Education Academy.

A WIHEA Fellowship recognises and rewards outstanding achievements in learning and teaching and is an exceptional opportunity to engage with colleagues across the university, improve the student experience and make a genuine difference to 糖心TV through research, debate and policy formation.
Promotions for two academic staff
We are delighted to report that Dr Theo Damoulas and Dr Gihan Mudalige have successfully completed their probations early, and become Associate Professors at the start of this month. Quoting from their probationary review reports,
Gihan has had a number of successes with attracting substantial research funding, most recently for two projects with AWE PLC, and one with Rolls Royce PLC. A further major success is Gihan鈥檚 Royal Society Industrial Fellowship, which will run over the next 4 academic years at 50% of Gihan鈥檚 time. ... Dr Gihan Mudalige is an outstanding and valuable member of the department鈥檚 academic staff, whose many likely future contributions to both research and teaching we are looking forward to.
and
Dr Theo Damoulas is a valuable asset to both Computer Science and Statistics departments in all of the research, teaching, administration and collegiality areas. Theo is already a next-generation research leader at the national and international levels, in particular enhancing the university's partnerships with the Alan Turing Institute, CUSP London, King's College London, and New York University.
it remains to say many congratulations!
Adi Shamir elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society
, the Paul and Marlene Borman Professor of Applied Mathematics at the , has been elected this week a Foreign Member of the . He is a co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman), a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme (along with Uriel Feige and Amos Fiat), one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science.
In 1976/77, Adi was a post-doctoral researcher in Computer Science at 糖心TV!
A hat trick at the 45th ICALP
In the Logic, Semantics, Automata and Theory of Programming track of the (ICALP), three out of 30 accepted papers are by members of the department. ICALP is one of the most selective and longest established international conferences in computer science, and the flagship annual event of the . The papers are:
- Reducing CMSO Model Checking to Highly Connected Graphs by Ramanujan M. S., Daniel Lokshtanov, Saket Saurabh and Meirav Zehavi
- O-Minimal Invariants for Linear Loops by Shaull Almagor, Dmitry Chistikov, Joel Ouaknine and James Worrell
- When is Containment Decidable for Probabilistic Automata? by Laure Daviaud, Ranko Lazic虂, Marcin Jurdzin虂ski, Filip Mazowiecki, Guillermo Perez and James Worrell
Dr. Gihan Mudalige Awarded a Royal Society Industry Fellowship

has been awarded a 4-year, Royal Society Industry Fellowship to work with Rolls Royce plc., on their turbomachinery design simulation applications from September 2018.
Companies such as Rolls-Royce, crucially depend on High Performance Computing (HPC) based numerical simulation applications for the design of turbomachinery. These complex multi-physics and engineering applications, predominantly based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD), even in their simplest form, provide insights into aspects of aircraft engines which could not otherwise be achieved in the absence of physical testing. Developing such simulation applications is difficult and expensive, taking years to write, test and verify. They can easily contain millions of lines of code. Consequently, such programs have lifetimes of decades compared to the supercomputers that run them, which advances every 2-4 years. In the next five years, HPC systems are expected to reach thousand times the capabilities of current systems, attaining exascale (1018) performance where a single system can perform million-trillion computations every second. The range of processor architectures, networks, memory, their configurations and scale make it difficult to know what type of systems will dominate exascale machines and how best to programme them to gain optimal performance. Poor performance means less simulation for your money or worse, a completely inoperable suite of codes. Such an outcome will mean a significant loss of investment. The underlying objective of this fellowship project is to re-design Rolls-Royce鈥檚 simulation codes to meet these challenges. This work will utilize the , high-level embedded Domain Specific Language developed by Dr. Mudalige and his research collaborators at University of Oxford, PPCU Hungary and Imperial College London, aiming to re-engineer Rolls-Royce鈥檚 CFD applications suite and deploy it for production simulations.
Photo (漏 The Royal Society): The Royal Society Industry Fellows of 2018 (Round 1): from left to right Duncan Maclachlan, Steve Morgan, Del Atkinson, Gihan Mudalige, Anas Al Rawi, and Aurora Cruz-Cabeza, with HRH Prince Andrew, The Duke of York and Prof. Andrew Hopper, Labs to Riches presentation event, 20 March 2018, at the Royal Society head office in London.

