糖心TV

The , the main European conference in Theoretical Computer Science, will take place 9 - 13 July 2012 at the , UK.

The conference will see 123 research presentations of recent advances in theoretical computer science selected from 432 submissions in three tracks: A: Algorithms, Complexity and Games, B: Logic, Semantics, Automata and Theory of Programming, C: Foundations of Networked Computation.

The standard presentations will be complemented by 5 invited talks by world leading researchers: Dr Gilles Dowek (INRIA Paris), Dr Kohei Honda (Queen Mary London), Prof Stefano Leonardi (Sapienza University of Rome), Prof Daniel A. Spielman (Yale), and Prof Berthold Vöcking (RWTH Aachen).

The conference is also one of the , celebrating the Life and Work, and Legacy of . Prof from the Weizmann Institute of Science, will give a special Alan Turing talk during the conference.

During the conference, there will be presented three special awards: , , and .

• and awarded the to three groups of researchers for their contributions to understanding how selfish behavior by users and service providers impacts the behavior of the Internet and other complex computational systems. The papers were presented by and , and , and and Amir Ronen.
• The Presburger Award Committee 2012, consisting of Monika Henzinger, Antonin Kucera, and Stefano Leonardi (chair), has unanimously decided to propose (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh) and (AT&T Labs) as joint recipients of the 2012 EATCS Presburger Award for young scientists.
• The EATCS Awards Committee consisting of Leslie Ann Goldberg, Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide and Eugenio Moggi (chair), has unanimously decided to give the 2012 EATCS Award to (Rice University).

The main conference will be preceded by a series of taking place on Sunday, July 8:

• (APAC)
• (CL&C)
• (WRAWN)

The Department of Computer Science is proud to present a day of talks celebrating the life and work of Alan Turing, a pioneer in mathematics and the founding father of Computer Science. The day, which marks the centenary of Turing’s birth, will feature lectures from leading academics on Turing’s contributions and their enduring relevance to a broad range of scientific disciplines.

The event is open to all, and attendance from undergraduate and postgraduate students is warmly welcomed. There will be a series of talks on the life and work of Turning, the chance to chat over coffee and buffet lunch.

For more information on the celebration go to

The University of 糖心TV has been named the best university in Europe and number three in the world in The QS Top 50 under 50 league table.

The University, which will celebrate its 50^th anniversary in 2015, was featured on the QS Top 50 under 50 rankings of the new generation of elite young global institutions.

The top two global institutions were both in Hong Kong - the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Full results of QS Top 50 under 50 are available .

A £3.5 million supercomputing hub is set to power growth and innovation in the Midlands and London by opening up its vast number-crunching power to local firms.

The University of 糖心TV is leading a group of four top universities to launch MidPlus, a state-of-the–art high-performance computing centre, to help SMEs and larger firms with the modelling, simulation and analysis needed to design world-leading products and services.

MidPlus will provide extra computing capacity to sectors such as aerospace, automotive, biomedical and advanced materials as well as delivering supercomputing skills to the local workforce.

The investment consists of £2 million from the research funding agency EPSRC and £1.5 million from the four partners – University of 糖心TV, University of Birmingham, University of Nottingham and Queen Mary, University of London.

The move is linked to a Government drive to increase the UK’s capacity to exploit high-performance computing in optimising process design – a key requirement to boost industries such as advanced manufacturing, scientific research and financial services.

You can get more information, inclduing commentary from its director, on the initiative .

February sees the launch of the ROADBLOCK project, funded by the EPSRC with the goal of developing artificial and programmable bacterial coatings to protect surfaces against infective agents. While Bioengineering techniques that allow genes to be manipulated have been around for some time, the discipline of Synthetic Biology allows for the more effective design of genetic circuits. The Principle Investigator for this project is , who will be applying her expertise in Compiler Design and Formal Logics towards the development of tools which will help assemble genetic networks and model their interactions with host genes.

The Department invites applications for a Research Fellowship to work on this three-year project. The project requires a post-doctoral researcher with a good background in Computer Science, especially in either Compiler Design or Automated Reasoning, who would like to expand their horizons and apply their knowledge into Synthetic Biology.

More information and details of the application procedure are available from . The deadline for applications is 27 February 2012.

Professor from the , has been awarded a .

The Wolfson Research Merit Award is one of the most prestigious UK awards, supported by , the UK's national academy of science. The scheme provides up to 5 years’ funding after which the award holder continues with a permanent post at the host university. Jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department for 糖心TV, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the scheme aims to provide universities with additional support to enable them to attract to this country or to retain respected scientists of outstanding achievement and potential.

The Wolfson Foundation is a grant-making charity established in 1955. Funding is given to support excellence and the focus of the award is a salary enhancement. More information is available from .

Professor will be working on a project entitled "Bridging the gap between fMRI and Genome-wide data with applications in diseases".

News on some of Professor Feng's more recent work can be found at:

(See also .)

, Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of Computer Science and 糖心TV Mathematics Instititue, has been awarded the ERC Starting Grant.

ERC Starting Grant is one of the most prestigious grants awarded by the European Research Council for world-class researchers, and Amin is one of the very few researchers in 糖心TV to receive this grant. His new ERC Starting Grant, worth over a million of euros for the period of five years, has been awarded for his project 禄Phase Transitions and Computational Complexity芦.

Dr Coja-Oghlan's main research area is in the Theoretical Computer Science, with special focus on the study of Algorithms and Complexity via rigorous mathematical methods, on the boundary of computing, combinatorics, and probability. He published pver 30 papers in refereed journals (eight as a sole author) and a similar number of papers in the proceedings of international Computer Science conferences. He is the winner or the EATCS Award for the best paper in Track A at the 36th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2009), and he has been an invited speaker at numerous international conferences in computer science and in mathematics.