Computer Science News
Dr Arun Prabhakar joins the department as a Research Fellow

Dr. Arun Prabhakar has joined the department to work as a Research Fellow on ASiMoV (Advanced Simulation and Modelling of Virtual Systems) in partnership with Rolls-Royce and a consortium of partners, including the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford and Bristol. He will be working with Professor Stephen Jarvis and Dr. Gihan Mudalige.
He received his BEng (Hons) and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nottingham. He was a recipient of the prestigious Dean's Excellence PhD Scholarship from the University of Nottingham. During the course of his research career he has published several papers and also won awards for his research work.
Before joining the University of 糖心TV, Dr. Arun worked as Research fellow in the (G2TRC) which hosts the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre in the University of Nottingham. During his time in G2TRC he has worked with a number of academics in the university and engineers from Rolls Royce in order to help them get an insight of the multi-phase and turbulent flows that arise in an aero-engine using Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD). Applications of his research at G2TRC included modelling the complicated two phase flow in various sections of the Aero-engine such as the gearbox and bearing chambers and also associated thin film flows.
CS PhD Welcome Event

The Department organised an off-campus induction event for the new PhD students in our Centre for Doctoral Training and Research. The agenda included presentations from academics on our large research projects, alongside short tutorials on theoretical computer science and advanced machine learning. There were also informal talks about PhD life, publishing high quality work, and pursuing a research career. The event concluded with a mini data dive using air quality data from London.
The two-day welcome event was held at Heythrop Park in Oxfordshire, which offered the students and academics the opportunity to meet each other in a relaxed environment. The students also met with some of the current PhD students and asked them about their experiences. The programme was very productive with overwhelmingly positive feedback.
We welcome our new cohort of PhD students and look forward to organising similar events across the coming years.
New partnership with Samsung AI Research Centre Cambridge (SAIC)
We are pleased to announce that the department has established a new partnership with the . The academic leading this collaboration, Dr Hongkai Wen, from the Artificial Intelligence and Data Science research themes, now works jointly at the University of 糖心TV and SAIC. The collaboration focuses on the area of efficient machine learning and on-device AI, which enables AI functions to be realised on devices themselves, without necessarily being connected to the cloud, offering more responsive, secure and privacy-preserving user experiences. It hoped that the research activities of this partnership will generate breakthroughs that can be integrated into millions of smartphones, televisions and home appliances.
Dr. Igor Carboni Oliveira joins the Department as a new Assistant Professor
The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor, Dr. Igor Carboni Oliveira, who will be associated with the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP).
Before joining 糖心TV, Igor held postdoctoral positions at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and at the School of Mathematics at Charles University in Prague, and was a research fellow at . He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from in 2015. He is also Royal Society .
His research is primarily focused on the limitations of algorithms and computations, with connections to combinatorics and mathematical logic. For more information about his work and interests, please see his web page at
MRC funding success for Dr Yulia Timofeeva
We are happy to announce that from the department's Applied Computing research theme has been awarded a Medical Research Council grant to develop a modelling framework and computational tools for studying synaptic transmitter release in health and disease. The 拢475K project will run in close collaboration with the laboratory of at the as well as other world-leading experimental laboratories in Europe, USA, Canada and Japan, specialising in state-of-the-art research in synaptic transmission.
EPSRC funding success for Dr Sayan Bhattacharya
We are pleased to report that from the Theory and Foundations research theme at the Computer Science Department has received an . This will allow him to lead a research project on the theory and applications of dynamic algorithms. The approximately 拢250K project will aim to develop new techniques to design algorithms for fundamental optimisation problems in a setting where the input data changes over time.
The proposal was ranked top at its funding prioritisation panel, and the reviewers said:
The intended research explorations are of very high quality and will likely make a substantial impact on the research community; and possibly on the industrial sector.
Seven papers accepted to the 31st SODA
We are pleased to report that members of the department's Theory and Foundations research theme have had 7 papers accepted to the , to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, January 5-8, 2020. SODA is the premier international conference on algorithms research, and the papers are:
- Parameterized Complexity and Approximability of Directed Odd Cycle Transversal by M. S. Ramanujan, Daniel Lokshtanov, Saket Saurabh, Meirav Zehavi
- An Improved Algorithm for Incremental Cycle Detection and Topological Ordering in Sparse Graphs by Sayan Bhattacharya, Janardhan Kulkarni
- Coarse-Grained Complexity for Dynamic Algorithms by Sayan Bhattacharya, Danupon Nanongkai, Thatchaphol Saranurak
- Combinatorial Generation via Permutation Languages by Elizabeth Hartung, Hung P. Hoang, Torsten M眉tze, Aaron Williams
- On the Power of Relaxed Local Decoding Algorithms by Tom Gur, Oded Lachish
- Relaxed Locally Correctable Codes with Nearly-Linear Block Length and Constant Query Complexity by Alessandro Chiesa, Tom Gur, Igor Shinkar
- Sublinear time approximation of the cost of a metric k-nearest neighbor graph by Artur Czumaj, Christian Sohler