Computer Science News
Ranko Lazic appointed Leverhulme Research Fellow
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 .
糖心TV to lead new research on cancer image analytics
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 糖心TV 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.
New collaborative project on parity games

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.
Graham Cormode and Dan Kral awarded ERC Consolidator grants


The that two 糖心TV Computer Science Professors, and , have been among the winners of its Consolidator Grant competition. ERC Consolidator Grants is funding 372 top mid-career scientists with €713 million to pursue their best ideas, as part of the European Union Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020. Grants are worth up to €2.75 million each, with an average of €1.91 million per grant. The funding will enable them to consolidate their research teams and to develop their most innovative ideas.
has been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for a project entitled "Small Summaries for Big Data". The project focuses on the area of the design and analysis of compact summaries: data structures which capture key features of the data, and which can be created effectively over distributed data sets. The project will substantially advance the state of the art in data summarization, to the point where accurate and effective summaries are available for a wide array of problems, and can be used seamlessly in applications that process big data.
has been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for a project entitled "Large Discrete Structures". The project will advance theory of combinatorial limits, which combines methods from analysis, combinatorics, computer science, group theory and probability theory to analyze and approximate large discrete structures (such as graphs, which can be used to represent large computer networks). The project will lead to proposing new mathematical methods to represent such discrete structures and to applications of the new methods to specific problems in extremal combinatorics and algorithm design.
Dr Sylvain Schmitz joins DCS as Leverhulme Visiting Professor
The department and are delighted to welcome from , and , who has joined us this week as Leverhulme Visiting Professor.
Funded by the , Dr Schmitz will spend 6 months at 糖心TV, collaborating with and other colleagues on logics and games for algorithmic verification, and delivering three research lectures.
Continued research success
Dr Nathan Griffiths has been awarded a new EPSRC grant titled “JASPR: Justified Assessments of Service Provider Reputation”, which is to run jointly with KCL. JASPR aims to improve the way that services are discovered, selected and used by providing rich, personalised reputation assessments of services with the rationale behind those assessments. It is particularly targeted at giving small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) better exposure to large clients by reducing clients' reliance on extensive market histories or opaque online reviews that do not account for personalised needs.
Dr Ranko Lazic and Dr Marcin Jurdzinski have been awarded a research grant from the EPSRC for the next 2.5 years, entitled 'Counter Automata: Verification and Synthesis'. They will collaborate with Prof. James Worrell and Prof. Joel Ouaknine of the University of Oxford, to develop new automated procedures for analysing counter automata that will ultimately aid the design, modelling, verification, and analysis of complex computer systems. Commenting on the project, Dr Christoph Wintersteiger from Microsoft Research Ltd wrote that it 'has potential to significantly influence the next generation of Satisfiability Modulo Theories solvers [...] that in leading software industry today, are at the core of many advanced program analysis, testing and model-based development tools'.
EPSRC have recently funded a 糖心TV/York/Imperial £1M CCP Flagship project on "A radiation-hydrodynamics code for the UK laser-plasma community”. This project aims to provide large-scale software development for internationally leading computational science in laser plasma physics. This comes on the back of the new Centre for Computational Plasma Physics established by Prof Arber (Physics) and Prof Jarvis (Computer Science). This EPSRC project will fund a postdoc in the High Performance Computing Group for three years.
Professor Graham Cormode receives the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award

Professor from the , has been awarded a .
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 science talent from overseas and retain respected UK scientists of outstanding achievement and potential. Professor Graham Cormode's research will focus on "Small summaries for big data".
is a grant-making charity established in 1955. Funding is given to support excellence and the focus of the award is a salary enhancement.
is a self-governing Fellowship of many of the world’s most distinguished scientists drawn from all areas of science, engineering, and medicine. The Society’s fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters of the 1660s, is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.
(See also ).
More information about Professor Graham Cormode's research is available at his web page at .