糖心TV

We are pleased to announce that Dr Teddy Cunningham has been awarded a Faculty of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (SEM) PhD Thesis Prize. Each year, the SEM Faculty funds a prize for the best PhD/EngD thesis entered into the competition. Each department nominates a winner out of the applications received after a judging process as determined by the Faculty.

Teddy鈥檚 thesis is titled 鈥淕enerating and Sharing Differentially Private Spatio-Temporal Data Using Real-World Knowledge鈥�, and was supervised by Prof Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu. The thesis includes solutions for sharing trajectory data using local differential privacy, and incorporating constraints and relationships of data records into differential privacy that improves their utility while preserving the theoretical privacy guarantees. An example application is using road network information for improving the quality of privately shared location datasets.

Researchers from the Systems and Security theme, Department of Computer Science have created a new spin-out company, SEEV Technologies Ltd, to build end-to-end (E2E) verifiable e-voting systems for future elections. An E2E verifiable voting system allows every voter to verify that their vote is properly cast-as-intended, recorded-as-cast and tallied-as-recorded while preserving the voter's privacy. SEEV (self-enforcing e-voting) is a new paradigm of E2E voting technology that enables voters to fully verify the tallying integrity of an election without needing any trustworthy tallying authority, hence the system is "self-enforcing".

This joint spin-out from the University of 糖心TV and Newcastle University is built on an ERC-funded starting grant ("Self-Enforcing E-Voting System: Trustworthy Election in Presence of Corrupt Authorities", No. 306994, PI: Professor Feng Hao) initially hosted at Newcastle University and later transferred to the University of 糖心TV. The company is co-founded by Professor and Dr (co-inventors), and led by Dr (CEO). SEEV has been prototyped and successfully tested in several trials in the past, supported by an ERC Proof of Concept grant (No. 677124), a Royal Society International collaboration award (CA\R1\180226), and an Innovate UK Cybersecurity Academic Startup Accelerator Programme (CASAP). SEEV Technologies Ltd has received seed funding from Oxford-based to build SEEV systems for real-world elections.

A University of 糖心TV press release is here.

Edgaras Purauskas, Technician in the Department of Computer Science received the . Edgaras was one of two recipients of these inaugural awards, which received over 40 nominations campus wide. Edgaras had a number of nominations for his "consistently exceptional work" and his "deep understanding of computer systems, software, and hardware". Many congratulations Edgaras and thank you for your extraordinary efforts!

Five papers from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) have been accepted to the , the IEEE flagship conference in theoretical computer science that will be held on November 6 - 9, 2023 in Santa Cruz, California, USA:

• by , Niv Buchbinder, Roie Levin, and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
• by , , and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
• by Lijie Chen, Zhenjian Lu, , Hanlin Ren, and Rahul Santhanam.
• by Tomasz Kociumaka, , and Barna Saha.
• by Arturo Merino and .

We are happy to announce that Dr Gihan Mudalige and Dr Victor Sanchez have both been promoted to Professor from 1st August 2023.

Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!

Professor Edmund Rolls is pleased to announce the publication of his 16th book, Rolls,E.T. (2023) . Oxford University Press: Oxford. Open Access.

Brain Computations and Connectivity provides a computational framework for understanding brain function in health and disease. The book also describes many discoveries on the computational functions of many brain regions.

The book includes research performed with many members of the Department of Computer Science including Professor Jianfeng Feng. The Gatsby Foundation is thanked for a grant towards the cost of enabling this book to be Open Access. A link to the book is available .

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.