糖心TV

Prof. Yulan He from the department's Data Science and Human-Centred Computing research themes has been awarded a 3-year EPSRC grant to develop a new framework to study model/data uncertainty and model interpretability of AI systems. The interdisciplinary project will assist system stakeholders and developers to understand and reason about the (business, personal, social, etc.) impact of intelligent systems on the world in which they operate, and to understand how and why decisions are taken. It will run in collaboration with Dr. Ritabrata Dutta from the Statistics Department, and Dr. Nelly Bencomo and Prof. Pete Sawyer from Aston University.

Professor PI) from the Department of Computer Science and Dr Adrian von M眉hlenen (co-I) from the Department of Psychology have been awarded an EPSRC grant on 鈥淓nd to End Authentication of Caller ID in Heterogeneous Telephony Systems鈥�. This project will support a research fellow and a senior research fellow in computer science, each for four years, to explore new ways to stop caller ID spoofing without requiring globally trusted authorities, in collaboration with researchers from the Department of Psychology. This project will also aim to develop impacts by engaging with the telecommunication industry via the project partners: Huawei, Truecall, and RedTone.

The award of this project coincided with the announcement in March 2020 by the Federal Communications Commission (FFC), who for all telecom providers in the US in order to stop the caller ID spoofing scams. However, requires globally trusted authorities, which have been known to be difficult to manage. As opposed to the top-down approach by the FCC, this EPSRC project aims to take a bottom-up approach to develop more effective and more deployable solutions without relying on any globally trusted third parties.

A University press release on this project can be found here.

We are pleased to report that members of the department's Theory and Foundations research theme have had 6 papers accepted to the , the main European conference in Theoretical Computer Science and annual meeting of the . The papers are:

• On the central levels problem by Petr Gregor, Ond艡ej Mi膷ka and Torsten M眉tze
• Matrices of optimal tree-depth and row-invariant parameterized algorithm for integer programming by Timothy Chan, Jacob Cooper, Martin Kouteck媒, Dan Kr谩l and Krist媒na Pek谩rkov谩
• The Complexity of Verifying Loop-free Programs as Differentially Private by Marco Gaboardi, Kobbi Nissim and David Purser
• Rational subsets of Baumslag-Solitar groups by Micha毛l Cadilhac, Dmitry Chistikov and Georg Zetzsche
• The Strahler number of a parity game by Laure Daviaud, Marcin Jurdzinski and K. S. Thejaswini
• On the power of ordering in linear arithmetic theories by Dmitry Chistikov and Christoph Haase

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

The Department of Computer Science and the Mathematics Institute jointly hosted, last Saturday 7th December, the Christmas Meeting for 2019 of the British Society for the History of Mathematics.

Our Departments have a long and strong association with the which has an established tradition of having its Christmas meeting in the Midlands. With about 50 participants, including some staff and students from both our Departments, there were 8 talks in the day ranging from figurate numbers in the 9th century, Islamic use of sexagesimal calculation for 蟺 and sine values in the 15th century, to fascinating details of Victorian data processing and the mathematical semantics of programming languages in more recent times.

There were plenty of interesting questions arising and lively discussions in the refreshment intervals. There was also a presentation of the BSHM Neumann Prize and the Society's AGM.

The day was widely acclaimed as enjoyable and successful. Our thanks are due to both Departments for their sponsorship, to the admin and technical support in Computer Science, and to the local organising work of Steve Russ and Adam Jones. Further information about the BSHM is at .

Full list of speakers:

• Helen Ross - Dicuil and triangular numbers
• Steve Russ - Visions in the night: Bolzano's anticipations of continuity
• Jane Wess - From Newton to Newcomen: mathematics and technology 1687-1800
• Troy Astarte - On the difficulty of describing difficult things
• Catalin Iorga - Known and unknown in Al-Kashi's mathematics
• Robin Wilson - Hunting and counting trees: the world of Cayley and Sylvester
• Chris Pritchard - From collecting coins to searching the archives: personal reflections on becoming a historian of mathematics
• Martin Campbell-Kelly - Victorian data processing

We are please to report that Dr Maria Liakata has received a Turing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Fellowship.

The Fellowships from The Alan Turing Institute, the UK鈥檚 national institute for data science and AI, aim to attract and retain exceptional researchers in artificial intelligence. Covering a broad view of AI, including applications of foundational disciplines across mathematical sciences, statistical sciences, computational sciences and engineering, Fellows collaborate across disciplines and have the opportunity to collaborate with academia, industry, government and the third sector.

Dr Liakata鈥檚 Fellowship will focus on creating time sensitive sensors from language and heterogeneous user generated content. Commenting on the research she said:

鈥淲ide spread use of digital technology has made it possible to obtain language data (e.g., social media, SMS) as well as heterogeneous data (e.g., mobile phone use, sensors) from users over time. Such data can provide useful behavioural cues both at the level of the individual and the wider population, enabling the creation of longitudinal digital phenotypes.

鈥淐urrent methods in natural language processing (NLP) are not well suited to time sensitive, sparse and missing data, collected over time or personalised models of language use. The Turing AI fellowship will allow me to establish a new area in NLP on personalised longitudinal language processing.

鈥淚 plan to develop sensors for capturing digital biomarkers from language and heterogeneous user generated content to understand the evolution of an individual over time. I want to make a significant contribution to mental health by working with clinical experts to create new tools based on the sensors, making it possible to assess and measure conditions in between clinician appointments.鈥�

To read more on this story, please click here.