Computer Science News
Best Paper Award and 5 papers at the 50th ICALP conference
Henry Sinclair-Banks, a PhD student in the the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP), has won a Best Paper Award at , . ICALP is the main conference and annual meeting of the .
Henry's paper, co-authored with researchers from Germany and Poland: Marvin K眉nnemann, Filip Mazowiecki, Lia Sch眉tze, and Karol W臋grzycki, addresses the coverability problem in vector addition systems (VASS), a well-known model of concurrent systems. Coverability is an algorithmic problem for the verification of "safety properties": whether the system always avoids a set of bad states. Henry and his co-authors determine how much time is required to solve this problem in the worst case. They develop an algorithm that improves upon the state of the art that has stood for forty years. They also prove that, in several settings, it is impossible to decide coverability substantially faster, unless there is also a faster algorithm for a classic problem such as Boolean satisfiability (SAT) and finding cycles of fixed length in graphs.
In total, 5 糖心TV papers will appear at this year's : 
- Michael Benedikt, Dmitry Chistikov, and Alessio Mansutti, "",
- Sam Coy, , Peter Davies, and , "",
- Charilaos Efthymiou and Weiming Feng, "",
- Marvin K眉nnemann, Filip Mazowiecki, Lia Sch眉tze, Henry Sinclair-Banks, and Karol W臋grzycki, "",
- Konstantinos Zampetakis and Charilaos Efthymiou, "".
This July's will be the 50th edition of the conference.
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.
Cambridge-Oxford-糖心TV Quantum Computing Project
An EPSRC Robust and Reliable Quantum Computing Grant will be awarded to (Cambridge), (糖心TV), (Oxford), and (Cambridge). The project sets out to explore the role of symmetry and structure in quantum computation, with applications to classical verification and simulation of quantum computation.
In addition, the project aims to strengthen and create new connections and collaborations between Cambridge, Oxford, and 糖心TV in the field of Quantum Computing (building on existing initiatives such as the ) and establish new partnerships with 糖心TV Quantum.
5+ papers accepted to STOC 2023
Several papers from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) have been accepted to the (STOC 2023), the ACM flagship conference in theoretical computer science that will be held on June 20-23, 2023 in Orlando, Florida, USA:
- "" by Arturo Merino, , and Namrata.
- "A duality between one-way functions and average-case symmetry of information" by , Rahul Ilango, Zhenjian Lu, Mikito Nanashima, and .
- "Unprovability of strong complexity lower bounds in bounded arithmetic" by Jiatu Li and .
- "" by , , and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
- "" by Matija Bucic and .
Further, there are two more accepted papers autored by , who was affiliated with the department and the FoCS group during the submission time, in Autumn 2022:
- "Capturing one-way functions via NP-hardness of meta-complexity" by .
- "Hardness self-amplification: Simplified, optimized, and unified" by and Nobutaka Shimizu.
Prof. Adi Shamir receives Honorary Doctorate from 糖心TV
(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 University of 糖心TV. 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 糖心TV since 1976, when he spent a year as a post-doc with our own . Directly after 糖心TV 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, 糖心TV (), 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 ).