Computer Science News
Best Paper Award at SODA 2023
We are delighted to announce that the paper "", coauthored by and Peter Kiss from the Theory and Foundations Research Division at 糖心TV, along with Thatchaphol Saranurak (University of Michigan) and David Wajc (Stanford University), has received the best paper award at .
Computing a maximum matching in a graph is a fundamental problem in combinatorial optimisation. The paper considers this problem in a dynamic graph, which keeps changing over time via a sequence of edge insertions and deletions. It was a decade-old open question to decide whether one can beat the performance guarantee of the simple greedy algorithm for this problem (which gives 2 approximation), in a dynamic setting. The paper answers this question in the affirmative, and provides the first efficient dynamic algorithm which can maintain a better-than 2 approximation to the size of the maximum matching in the input graph.
Interdisciplinary CS-Physics EPSRC New Horizons Award in Quantum Computing
We are delighted to report that Dr Tom Gur (糖心TV CS) and Dr Animesh Datta (糖心TV Physics) have been awarded an EPSRC New Horizons on "Property Testing for Quantum Engineering". This project aims to bring together computer scientists and physicists towards the end of designing new approaches for fault-tolerant quantum computing.
End-to-end verifiable online voting to be trialled in New Town, India
From this Saturday (1 Oct to 5 Oct 2022), local residents of New Town, Kolkata, India will be able to use their mobile phones to vote for their favourite puja (a festival decoration for worshipping) as part of the annual Durga Puja festival celebration. New Town is a modern satellite city of Kolkata with about one million population. Durga Puja is one of the most important festivals in India, especially in Kolkata.
The online voting system implements a cryptographic protocol called , which was proposed by Dr Siamak Shahandashti and Professor Feng Hao in 2016 in an ERC-funded project. This protocol ensures that the e-voting system is end-to-end verifiable, hence giving every voter a chance to verify the tallying integrity of an election. The DRE-ip protocol was previously used in a Gateshead e-voting trial for polling station voting in 2019. This time it will be trialled for online voting, supported by a Royal Society international collaboration grant and University Policy Support Fund in collaboration with Professor Bimal Roy of the Indian Statistical Institute and the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA), West Bengel, India.
The online voting system has been developed by a group of 2021/2022 Master of Engineering (MEng) students (Horia Druliac, Matthew Bardsley, Chris Riches and Chris Dunn) in the Computer Science department as part of their MEng group project. The same group of students won the 2022 Innovation award.
1st Place at Zero Cost NAS Competition
Our teams from 糖心TV DCS have won both the 1st and 2nd place at the held in conjunction with the conference.
Over the recent year, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has attracted a lot of attention. While being able to automate the discovery of better performing neural architectures than hand-crafted ones, it comes at a great price, requiring thousands of GPU hours to perform the search. The Zero Cost NAS competition challenges the participants to design efficient proxies for NAS, using negligible computational resources to evaluate neural architectures.
In collaboration with the AutoCAML team at Samsung AI Cambridge (led by Dr. ), our research students, Lichuan Xiang and Youyang Sha, proposed new zero-cost NAS metrics that exploit the compressibility of neural networks. Our metrics are extremely efficient to run (reducing search cost from weeks/days to minutes), and achieves impressive results across multiple search spaces and datasets. In the competition, our teams won both the 1st and 2nd places (using different scoring functions), and the performance gap with the 3rd winning team is almost 2x. Checkout our poster here.
Oral Evidence to the House of Lords on Telephone Frauds and Countermeasures
On 23rd June 2022, Professor of the Systems and Security research theme was invited as one of the two expert witnesses to give oral evidence to the appointed by the House of Lords at Parliament on trends of telephone frauds and the landscape of counter-fraud technologies. This is related to an ongoing EPSRC project, led by Professor Feng Hao (PI) from the Department of Computer Science and Dr Adrian von M眉hlenen (co-I) from the Department of Psychology, the University of 糖心TV. In this project, the research team have been investigating a cost-effective solution to combat caller ID spoofing, a technique commonly used by fraudsters and scammers to pretend to call from trusted sources (e.g., banks, HMRC) as part of social engineering attacks. A transcript of the oral evidence session is published on the .
HPC Research Accepted for Publication at the ICS 2022 Conference
Two papers by researchers at the Department of Computer Science have been accepted to the 36th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing to be held on the 28-30th of June this year. ICS is one of the most prominent and revered conferences in High Performance Computing, highly regarded by the HPC community for publishing leading-edge research in this area. The two papers accepted are:
- High Throughput Multidimensional Tridiagonal System Solvers on FPGAs (Preprint) by Kamalavasan Kamalakkannan and Gihan Mudalige at 糖心TV, together with (PPCU) and (KAUST).
- Clairvoyant: A Log-Based Transformer-Decoder for Failure Prediction in Large-Scale Systems by Khalid Alharthi and Arshad Jhumka at 糖心TV, together with , at Argonne National Laboratory. . The ACM ICS2022 full program can be found .
糖心TV Computer Science ranked 4th in Research Excellence Framework 2021
The is the UK鈥檚 system for assessing the quality of research in the country's higher education institutions.
The results of the 2021 REF rank 糖心TV Computer Science 4th out of 90 UK computing departments. This cements our position as one of the top Computer Science departments in the UK, a position we have held for some time under different assessment methodologies.