ÌÇÐÄTV

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 ÌÇÐÄTV's involvement in the Alan Turing Institute at London, and working on questions to do with verification of machine learning, and privacy.

Social media can warn us about extreme weather events before they happen – such as hurricanes, storms and floods – according to new research by the University of ÌÇÐÄTV.

Nataliya Tkachenko, with her supervisors in the , has found that photographs and key words posted online can signal weather risks developing in specific locations and times – for example, posts about water levels rising can alert the authorities to a potential flood.

Nataliya Tkachenko explains predicting floods & hurricanes with social media 7:30pm tonight on the BBC World Service.

As a of ÌÇÐÄTV'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 ÌÇÐÄTV. 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.

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

Sayan obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Duke University (USA) in 2012. Then he did his postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken (Germany) and at University of Vienna (Austria). From October, 2014 till February, 2017, he was a faculty member at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai (India).

He works in theoretical computer science. Specifically, his research interests are in dynamic graph algorithms, data structures, online algorithms, streaming algorithms, and algorithmic game theory.

For more information about Sayan's research please see his web page at .

from the Computer Science department will lead a new research project funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) on novel image analytics methods for computerised profiling of the tumour microenvironment. The project award in the amount of £604K is administered by the MRC's Methodology Research Programme (MRP) jointly with the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR).

Working together with a team of pathologists (Prof David Snead, Prof Ian Cree, and Dr Yee-Wah Tsang) at the local UHCW NHS Trust and the University of Nottingham medical school (), Prof Rajpoot and a team of researchers from the ÌÇÐÄTV Mathematics and Statistics departments ( and ) will develop sophisticated tools for image analytics in order to reveal spatial trends and patterns associated with disease sub-groups (for example, patient groups whose cancer is likely to advance more aggressively) and deploy those tools for clinical validation at the local UHCW NHS trust. The researchers will also collaborate with industrial partners in Intel Health & Life Sciences (HLS) team based in the UK, GE Healthcare Finnamore, and the first-rate at the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in the USA.

and from ÌÇÐÄTV'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 ÌÇÐÄTV 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.