糖心TV

The workshop Algorithms & Complexity @ 糖心TV took place at the University of 糖心TV on September 22-23, 2025 (see for more details).

The aim of the event was to highlight several recent exciting advances in the field of Algorithms and Complexity, to facilitate interactions within the research community, and to provide an excellent opportunity for Theory researchers (including academics, postdocs, and students) to connect and collaborate.

We had a fantastic list of invited speakers by renowned world experts: (Technical University of Catalonia), (University of Bath), (University of Pennsylvania), (Max Planck Institute for Informatics), (Charles University in Prague), (University of Sheffield and University of Haifa), (University of Oxford), (University of Cambridge), (University of Toronto).

co-authored by Arpan MukhopadhyayLink opens in a new window has received the Best Paper Award at . Mobihoc is a premier international conference on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing. The other authors in the paper are Samira Ghanbarian (uWaterloo), Ravi R. Mazumdar (uWaterloo), and Fabrice Guillemin (Orange Labs, France).

The paper addresses the problem of optimally allocating processors to parallelisable tasks having arbitrary concave speed-up functions. In general, determining the optimal number of processors to allocate to each task in an online fashion is a hard problem since allocating too many processors to one job will make those processors unavailable to other jobs whereas allocating too few processors will result in a small speed-up for the job. The paper proposes a simple randomised algorithm for determining the optimal number of processors to allocate to each job without requiring preemption (or repacking). It shows that the proposed algorithm is asymptotically optimal as the number of processors becomes large (which is often the case in modern clouds) and is also robust to variations in the job size distribution. This is the first time such an algorithm has been found in the literature.

Neha Rino, a PhD student in the Theory and Foundations group in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Cyber Security group at WMG, has won an at FORMATS 2024.

The Oded Maler award is a distinction presented for the best paper of the International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems (FORMATS). of the conference was held in September in Calgary, Canada, jointly with QEST (International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems) as a common research forum dedicated to quantitative modelling, analysis, and verification.

Neha's paper, "", is co-authored with Mohammed Foughali and Eugene Asarin, both from and in Paris, France, where Neha completed the Master's degree (ENS Paris-Saclay) prior to joining 糖心TV.

Neha's paper contributes to the research framework of quantitative monitoring, which is the analysis of individual executions of systems which yields numerical output (real numbers), rather than binary yes/no. The paper formulates and solves, by an efficient algorithm, a new problem of this kind: computing a real number that characterises to which extent the given execution of a satisfies its specification expressed in (STL).

Eight papers authored by Computer Science researchers from 糖心TV have been accepted for publication at the , the leading international venue for machine learning research, which will be held on 10-15 December 2024 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada:

• Generating Origin-Destination Matrices in Neural Spatial Interaction Models, by Ioannis Zachos, Mark Girolami, and Theodoros Damoulas
• Interventionally Consistent Surrogates for Complex Simulation Models, by Joel Dyer, Nicholas Bishop, Yorgos Felekis, Fabio Massimo Zennaro, Ani Calinescu, Theodoros Damoulas, and Michael Wooldridge
• Learning the Expected Core of Strictly Convex Stochastic Cooperative Games, by Phuong Nam Tran, The Anh Ta, Shuqing Shi, Debmalya Mandal, Yali Du, and Long Tran-Thanh
• Physics-Informed Variational State-Space Gaussian Processes, by Oliver Hamelijnck, Arno Solin, and Theodoros Damoulas
• SARAD: Spatial Association-Aware Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis for Multivariate Time Series, by Zhihao Dai, Ligang He, Shuanghua Yang, and Matthew Leeke
• Symmetric Linear Bandits with Hidden Symmetry, by Phuong Nam Tran, The Anh Ta, Debmalya Mandal, and Long Tran-Thanh
• The Effectiveness of Surprisingly Popular Voting with Partial Preferences, by Hadi Hosseini, Debmalya Mandal, and Amrit Puhan
• What makes unlearning hard and what to do about it, by Kairan Zhao, Meghdad Kurmanji, George-Octavian B膬rbulescu, Eleni Triantafillou, and Peter Triantafillou

Six papers co-authored by DIMAP and Theory and Foundations researchers were presented earlier in July at , the 51st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming:

• Rohan Acharya, , : Lookahead Games and Efficient Determinisation of History-Deterministic B眉chi Automata,
• Dmitry Chistikov, Alessio Mansutti, Mikhail R. Starchak: ,
• , Guichen Gao, Shaofeng H.-C. Jiang, Robert Krauthgamer, Pavel Vesel媒: ,
• Argyrios Deligkas, Eduard Eiben, Robert Ganian, Iyad Kanj, : ,
• Julian D枚rfler, : ,
• , Rahul Santhanam: .

ICALP is the main conference and annual meeting of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (). took place in Tallinn, Estonia, on the 8th to 12th of July 2024.

Dmitry's paper "" won the Best Paper Award of ICALP's Track B, which is a flagship research meeting on Automata, Logic, Semantics, and Theory of Programming. The paper studies the following problem: given a system of linear equations and constraints of the form y=2^x, does it have a solution over the natural numbers? By using and extending a method that generalises , Dmitry and his co-authors Alessio Mansutti and Mikhail Starchak show that the problem belongs to . This result provides a way to efficiently certify the existence of a solution, even if all solutions are very big (towers of exponentials).

This is the second time in a row that this award goes to a 糖心TV paper: Henry Sinclair-Banks, a DIMAP PhD student, was an awardee in 2023.

Toby Flynn, PhD student in the department's High-Performance and Scientific Computing group, supervised by Prof. Gihan Mudalige together with at IBM Research UK received the best paper award at the last week in San Francisco US. IPDPS is one of the most prominent and high ranking conferences in parallel and distributed computing, now in its 38th year.

The paper titled "Performance-Portable Multiphase Flow Solutions with Discontinuous Galerkin Methods", details the development of a new performance portable solver workflow using Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for developing multiphase flow simulations based on the domain-specific language. Results demonstrate scaling on both CPU and GPU systems including UK's national supercomputer, ARCHER2 at EPCC Edinburgh and the European Petascale Supercomputer, LUMI hosted by CSC Finland. The work is a collaboration with IBM Research UK supported by an iCASE award funded jointly by IBM and EPSRC.

The paper pre-print is available .

The Department of Computer Science is hosting the alumni reunion conference on March 22nd - bringing together current and past students, along with academics and researchers to enjoy a day of talks and demonstrations.