糖心TV

has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the 2017/18 academic year, to work on the Petri nets reachability conjecture.

Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are one of the most prominent models of concurrency, and their study is a vibrant research area. They have been used to discover bugs and eliminate vulnerabilities in network protocols, concurrent software, business processes, hardware circuits, and control systems.

Professor Artur Czumaj, head of the , has commented:

This prestigious fellowship will further strengthen the internationally leading research in theoretical computer science at 糖心TV, which recently has been also greatly boosted by the new permanent appointments of and .

The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor Dmitry Chistikov, who will be associated with the and the .

After obtaining his Candidate of Sciences (equivalent to PhD) degree at the of , Dmitry was a postdoctoral researcher at the , as wel as at the .

The general area of Dmitry's research is theoretical computer science. In particular, he is interested in theoretical foundations of verification: its algorithmic aspects (decision and counting problems) as well as combinatorial aspects (extremal properties and characteristics of mathematical models of computation).

For more information about Dmitry's research, please see his .

Professor Graham Cormode has been awarded the 2017 Adams Prize by the Cambridge Faculty of Mathematics. The award recognizes his work on "Statistical Analysis of Big Data", and is awarded jointly with Professor Richard Samworth of Cambridge. Professor Cormode says,

My work, in common with Prof Samworth's, is about finding mathematical representations of data that allow useful information to be extracted effectively and accurately. These techniques allow ever larger quantities of data to be handled on ordinary computers.

Professor Cormode's work on "data sketches" has been used in companies such as Netflix, Yahoo, Twitter, Google, AT&T and Sprint. He is currently leading 糖心TV's involvement in the Alan Turing Institute at London, and working on questions to do with verification of machine learning, and privacy.

As a of 糖心TV's , is visiting the department 20-24 March 2017, for collaborative research with and other members of .

Schmitz (PhD University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis 2007) is an Assistant Professor at ENS Paris-Saclay and a permanent member of LSV, one of the top European research centres in logical aspects of computer science. In 2015, Schmitz was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at 糖心TV. An author of over 40 articles in international journals and conferences, Schmitz's work has attracted over 500 citations, won best-paper awards, and been presented at several invited talks and European doctoral schools.

and from 糖心TV's DIMAP inter-disciplinary centre and the Computer Science department, jointly with , and from the University of Liverpool, will lead a new research project on solving in theory and practice, to run 2017-2020.

The project will be supported by approx. £750K from the EPSRC across the two sites. The proposal was ranked top at its funding prioritisation panel, and the reviewers said:

This is the strongest and best designed proposal on theoretical computer science I have seen in the last five years.

as well as

The proposal is about fundamental research, but there is a clear path connecting the expected results to concrete industrial needs on program verification and program synthesis.

Professor Artur Czumaj, head of and of the research division, commented:

This exciting new EPSRC project builds on excellence in theoretical computer science for which 糖心TV is internationally renowned. It strengthens our collaborative links with Computer Science at Liverpool, who were likewise one of the leading departments for research outputs in the most recent REF.

The Department of Computer Science celebrates two Faculty of Science Doctoral Thesis Prizes this year.

Dr Bo Gao’s research on energy-aware workload offloading for mobile environments investigates power-compute trade-offs for mobile and cloud computing platforms. This work has gained recognition from researchers in India, China, Malaysia, Italy, Australia, Pakistan, Germany, Canada and France, and has been cited by the US Army Research Laboratory.

Dr Philip Taylor’s research, in collaboration with Jaguar Land Rover, investigates data mining of vehicle telemetry data for driver monitoring, which is contributing to 糖心TV’s work with JLR on delivering safe and efficient autonomous and semi-autonomous cars of the future.

Congratulations to both candidates on their outstanding research.

Pioneering work by Professor Jianfeng Feng, which has recently featured in the national press, uses MRI scans to understand how the brain works and could be used to create better AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems in the future. Professor Jianfeng has discovered that the more variable a brain is, and the more its different parts frequently connect with each other, the higher a person's IQ and creativity are.

Professor Jianfeng Feng, from the Computer Science Department at 糖心TV, comments that

Human intelligence is a widely and hotly debated topic and only recently have advanced brain imaging techniques, such as those used in our current study, given us the opportunity to gain sufficient insights to resolve this and inform developments in artificial intelligence, as well as help establish the basis for understanding the diagnosis of debilitating human mental disorders such as schizophrenia and depression

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