糖心TV

Another piece of excellent news: and have been promoted to Associate Professor, effective from 1 May 2020. Quoting from their recommendations,

Dr鈥疊hattacharya has attracted a very competitive EPSRC New Investigator grant and a high-profile UK-Israel collaborative grant with the Weizmann Institute... . Dr鈥疊hattacharya鈥檚 high standing in the research community is confirmed by his memberships of the programme committees of prestigious conferences, as well as his organisation of international research events. 鈥� Dr鈥疊hattacharya has developed a new 3rd-year core module for Discrete Mathematics students and delivered it for the past three years, as well as now teaching most of a key 1st-year core module for the same degree course.

and

Dr鈥疓ur has attracted a highly prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, as well as growing his international leading publications record. He is also growing a successful own research group, having recruited a PhD student and on track to employing several postdocs. 鈥� voluntarily exceeding his workload, Dr鈥疓ur has developed from scratch and currently teaches a popular 4th-year module on quantum computing. Mentioning here only some of his other contributions, Dr鈥疓ur also 鈥� is the organiser of the main departmental research seminar, was an active contributor to the department鈥檚 recent Athena SWAN submission, and has been developing fruitful links with several industrial partners.

it remains to say many congratulations!

In the current challenging context, a piece of excellent news: Dr Jane Sinclair and Dr Yulia Timofeeva have been promoted to Professor, effective from 1 June 2020. Quoting from their recommendations,

Dr Sinclair is an established educational leader in the department, the faculty, the university, nationally and internationally. Going far beyond development and delivery of teaching in the department, many of the main educational advances in Computer Science in recent years are due to Dr Sinclair, 鈥� Nationally and internationally, building on her excellent educational scholarship that has recently won a prestigious Best Paper Award, Dr Sinclair has shown sustained leadership in her work with ACM (the world鈥檚 computing society) as well as the leading national organisations Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC) and Computing At School (CAS), resulting in substantial impact on secondary and higher computing education in the UK and beyond.

and

Dr Timofeeva has an established international reputation for her research that spans several areas. Her recent successes with attracting external funding are impressive, including a 拢475K MRC grant and a major role in the 拢4.6M renewal of the MathSys CDT. 鈥� Dr Timofeeva has a strong track record of engaging with a variety of stakeholders in the context of her research field, through her editorial work, conference organisation, and visiting appointments. She has played a leading role in the UK Mathematical Neuroscience Network, which facilitates joint efforts by top UK researchers to tackle real-life problems. 鈥� One of the most collegiate and efficient Computer Science academics, Dr Timofeeva has had a large number of key administrative roles in the department and the MathSys CDT.

it remains to say many congratulations!

We are delighted to report that Dr Claire Rocks has been promoted to Associate Professor, and that Dr Florin Ciucu and Dr Matthew Leeke have been promoted to Reader, effective from 1 June 2020. Quoting from Matt's recommendation,

Dr Leeke has a number of internationally excellent publications, and has contributed to several research grants, the two largest ones being strategic industrial collaborations. 鈥� In addition to his sustained teaching excellence in the department, Dr Leeke has led and contributed to a variety of key educational activities at the departmental, faculty and institutional levels.

from Florin's recommendation,

Dr Ciucu鈥檚 high esteem by members of his international research community is evidenced by his services in editing leading journals and being on programme committees of highly ranked conferences. 鈥� Dr Ciucu is known in the department for the quality of his teaching and high levels of student engagement in his modules, which have included a challenging but central MSc module in data analytics.

and from the recommendation for Claire,

Dr Rocks has been an educational leader in the department as well as nationally, both through her scholarship-led development and delivery of modules (1st-year and 3rd-year undergraduate, and most recently for IATL and 糖心TV in London), and her contributions in the Academic Studies Committee in Computer Science. 鈥� Dr Rocks has built institutional, regional and national reputations through her leadership of outreach and engagement activities. In addition to delivering CPD for teachers with the National Centre for Computing Education, Dr Rocks has played key roles in numerous events including the British Science Festival, the Festival of the Imagination, the Cheltenham Science Festival, and Sutton Trust Summer Schools.

it remains to say many congratulations!

The 17th 糖心TV Postgraduate Colloquium in Computer Science (WPCCS) was held on Monday 9 December, in the Mathematical Science Building for the first time. This year鈥檚 event saw 78 submissions from postgraduate research students in the Department. The submissions were split across six varied tracks, highlighting the breadth and depth of research currently being conducted by PhD students within the Department.

Student presentations were supplemented with two engaging guest talks from academics in the Department. Torsten M眉tze captured everyone's attention with the mathematics behind origami, and Feng Hao enlightened the audience on the encryption challenges behind e-voting. The day concluded with a festive drinks reception, sponsored by the Department鈥檚 two Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), at which prizes were awarded to the best posters and presentations.

PhD student attendee Jonathan Davies said, 鈥淚t was very rewarding for me to present at WPCCS this year. It gave me the opportunity to share my research with others and engage in stimulating conversation with my fellow postgraduate colleagues. The guest talks, in particular, were thought-provoking and engaging. I look forward to presenting at WPCCS in the future."

Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu, Director of Postgraduate Research and CS CDT, said, 鈥淚t was a pleasure to attend WPCCS this year and to celebrate the excellent work that has been undertaken by our PhD students in the past year. It was great to see how everyone was having research discussions and exchanging ideas with each other.鈥�

Prize Winners

• Best Presentation - John Pocock
• Best Poster - Tom Wood
• Best in Computational Biology - John Pocock, Rawan Abulsayli and Hammam Alghamdi
• Best in Theory, Foundations, and Discrete Mathematics - Alex Dixon and Thesjaswini Raghavan
• Best in Computer Security and Networks - Jasmine Grosso and Shin Wan
• Best in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence - Tom Wood, Abeer Almowallad, Gabriele Pergola, Haoyi Wang, Junyu Li and Helen McKay
• Best in High Performance Computing and Databases - Richard Kirk and Dean Chester
• Best in Urban Science - Jonathan Davies, Teddy Cunningham, Elisa Baioni, Ivana Tosheva and Shanaka Perera

It is with great sadness that we report that Professor Roland Wilson passed away on 19 November 2019. He joined the Department of Computer Science as Senior Lecturer in 1985, becoming Reader in 1992 and Professor in 1999, serving as Head of Department from 2006 to 2009, and retiring to Emeritus Professor in 2010.

Professor Wilson was one of the world's foremost experts in image processing leading one of the UK's largest image processing groups, at the University of 糖心TV. He conducted image processing research at an international level for more than 30 years, publishing over 130 papers, and supervising over 20 PhD students to completion. He was jointly awarded the 1985 Pattern Recognition Society medal for best paper in the journal Pattern Recognition.

Roland was renowned for his deep knowledge and understanding of signal and image processing and information theory and was one of the earliest proponents for the idea of multiscale image analysis, an idea common place in modern artificial neural networks. This led to some break-through works in image representations, including spatial/spatial-frequency representations such as the multi-resolution wavelet transform (MFT) for which he and his many PhD students were able to show to have numerous useful applications from image restoration, object detection, image segmentation and music transcription. Many of his ideas developed from interests in the working of the human visual system and further inspired by his long and fruitful collaboration with colleagues from the University of Linkoping, Sweden, G枚sta Grunland and Hans Knutsson. This had begun during a visit to Linkoping in the early 1980s.

At 糖心TV, Roland taught probability theory, digital signal processing (with colleagues from Engineering) and neural computing for many years. Even up to this day, his neural computing course (which he first taught in the early 1990s, way before the current fashions in machine learning) continues to be hugely popular. On it he showed students not only the mathematics and principles of artificial neural networks, but also how it is understood our brains perform computation for perception and how memory works. Roland had a great passion for this subject and a unique and profound understanding of it, having read widely in neuroscience and neurophysiology. Over the years, he has been an inspirational teacher to many hundreds of 糖心TV computer science graduates.

In 2006 Roland co-founded a University spin-out tech company (糖心TV Warp) to apply his ideas on image analysis to the challenging problem of fingerprint matching. He used his knowledge and ingenuity to solve the problem of fast and accurate fingerprint matching and this led to a set of novel methods. These were later patented and a software implementation was bench-marked in 2010, ranking in the world's top three commercial fingerprint matching solutions. The algorithm he devised are being used to this day for humanitarian work with the UNHCR and in a commercial setting for access-control at numerous construction sites in the UK. In 2010, he decided to take part-retirement and to focus more on commercial research, enjoying the challenge of the need to create practical solutions within the constraints of speed and data storage.

Roland was a wonderfully supportive father and grandfather and will be greatly missed by family, friends and colleagues. Our deep condolences are sent to his children Neil and Katy, and grandchildren, Robin, Sam, Charlie and Isla.

Colleagues and friends are invited to attend a celebration of Roland's life at Cannon Hill Chapel, Canley Crematorium, Friday 13 December at 10:30am.

On 15–17 November, we saw a number of Department of Computer Science students from across undergraduate and postgraduate communities represent 糖心TV at the (NWERC) held in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Our 3 teams (led by Dr Dmitry Chistikov) finished in the middle of the 124-team scoreboard.

The NWERC is an annual contest in which teams from universities all over the Northwestern part of Europe are given a series of algorithmic problems.

The goal of each team is to solve as many problems as possible within the 5-hour time limit. Potential solutions are submitted and judged by an automated system. The top teams at the end of the contest qualify for the global World Finals.

We look forward to the next national round () in autumn 2020 and to the future NWERC in Reykjavik, Iceland. Training sessions will resume in term 2, please do not hesitate to contact Dmitry (D.Chistikov@warwick.ac.uk) for further details if you鈥檙e interested in this.