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Julian Bhardwaj, a first year Discrete Mathematics student, has successfully made it through to the Grand Final of the which will be held in March. Julian actually qualified twice for the preceding final rounds through his performance in the SANS Packet Capture Analysis and the SANS/Sophos Penetrations Test competitions. His performance in the "" final round placed in the top 11 candidates, competing against students and experienced IT professionals alike.

Julian has already won a year's subscription to the National Skills Academy for IT and there are more "career enabling" prizes on offer in the Grand Final which Julian is hoping will help him get into a future career in the computer security industry.

Julian is currently taking the module CS134, "" and wishes to continue to develop his knowledge of Computer Security throughout his degree course and possibly postgraduate study.

joins the Department of Computer Science as a new Professor in January 2012.

Maxim obtained his PhD in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science in 1999 from the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics and Novosibirsk State University. Then he spent two years as a post-doc at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Aarhus University, and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, before becoming a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights in December 2001.

Maxim's primary research interest lies in the area of the design and analysis of algorithms for discrete optimization problems. He published over 50 papers in top Computer Science, Operations Research and Discrete Mathematics journals and conferences. He designed several algorithms with best known performance guarantees for such classical optimization models as traveling salesman problem, generalized assignment problems, submodular maximization, multi-dimensional bin packing problems, job shop scheduling with various objective functions, and other inventory and supply chain management problems. He has been also working on the design of practical algorithms and modeling of the optimization problems arising in practice.

For more information about Maxim's research please visit his .

Matthew Leeke has joined the Department of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor.

Matthew joins the department as the first post holder for the John Buxton Lectureship in Computer Science, having completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at The University of 糖心TV in 2008 and gone on to join the department's Performance Computing and Visualisation Group for his PhD.

Matthew's primary research interests relate to issues in the design, implementation and evaluation of dependable software systems. In particular, his most recent work has focused on the development of frameworks for the design of dependable software systems based on software measurement and metics, fault injection analysis techniques for the evaluation of software systems and approaches for the generation of efficient error detection mechanisms.

For more information on Matthew's research interests and teaching please visit his or stop by CS2.06.

Last week we were pleased to be host to an entire Year 8 (about 95 twelve-year-olds and their teachers) from St Alban's Academy in Birmingham. The visit was organised by Rushda Joomun one of the first of our graduates in who was only a few weeks into the programme. It was what the school called a 'SuperLearning Day'. We organised a 'roundabout' of sessions: the Mathematics of animal gaits in Maths, Three sorts of sorting (without computers!) in Computer Science, and how to draw stars (and other shapes) with Scratch in the DigiLab.

Many thanks to the local Branch for sponsoring lunch, and to Claire Davenport of the for visiting and giving us inspiring words at the end. The children were excited, enthusiastic and seemed to enjoy themselves a lot - judging by the roar of approval at the end of the day! What impressed us the most was the high degree of engagement and attention being given by all the children across a very wide ability range in all the sessions. This was a credit not only to the children and their teachers but also to the hard work and preparation undertaken by the session leaders. Many thanks to all - we think everybody learned a great deal from the SuperLearning Day!

Tim Davidson successfully completed his PhD titled "Formal Verification Techniques using Quantum Process Calculus" under the supervision of Dr Rajagopal Nagarajan. Quantum information processing is an emerging technology and formal modeling of quantum protocols is important for the design and development of quantum communication and cryptographic systems. Tim's thesis contributes to the development of the quantum process calculus CQP, proposed by Gay and Nagarajan in POPL'05. In particular, it investigates process equivalence and solves an open problem by proposing a suitable congruence. Tim's external examiner was Dr Paulo Mateus (Lisbon) and his internal examiner was Dr Jane Sinclair.

Tim is currently attending interviews for jobs in information security.

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.