Computer Science News
DCS Summer BBQ
The Department of Computer Science celebrated the end of the academic year with a staff BBQ, along with some games of rounders and a tug of war.
Thank you everyone for your hard work this year!
Workshop on Future Interface of Computing and Path
Wednesday 3rd July 2024 saw 30+ colleagues interested in Artificial Intelligence and Pathology descend on Warwick University鈥檚 TIA Centre to hold a workshop.

Delegates from a variety of disciplines, including pathologists and data scientists, attended the workshop, on Campus. The focus of the workshop was to explore the Future Interface of Computing and Pathology.
The meeting was lively and interactive and will be the first in a series of workshops that will be hosted by the TIA Centre in furtherance of this subject area. Thank you to all those who participated.
If you would like to join in future workshops please contact the TIA Centre at tia@warwick.ac.uk.
6 papers accepted to FOCS 2024
Six papers from the Theory and Foundations Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications (DIMAP) have been accepted to the , the flagship conference in theoretical computer science that will be held on October 27 - 30, 2024 in Chicago, USA:
- "" by Lijie Chen, Jiatu Li and .
- "" by , Din Carmon, , Shay Solomon and Tianyi Zhang.
- "Fully Dynamic k-Clustering with Fast Update Time and Small Recourse" by , , Naveen Garg, Silvio Lattanzi and Nikos Parotsidis.
- "The Tractability Border of Reachability in Simple Vector Addition Systems with States" by Dmitry Chistikov, Wojciech Czerwi艅ski, 艁ukasz Orlikowski, Filip Mazowiecki, Henry Sinclair-Banks and Karol W臋grzycki.
- "Optimal Coding Theorems for Randomized Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications" by Shuichi Hirahara, and Mikito Nanashima.
- "On the Complexity of Avoiding Heavy Elements" by , , Hanlin Ren and Rahul Santhanam.
Breakthrough result on the power of memory in computation
A published by , a postdoctoral researcher in the Theory and Foundations (FoCS)Link opens in a new window research group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP)Link opens in a new window, has disproved a longstanding conjecture on the limitations of space-bounded computation.
For many years it had been believed that a function, known as Tree Evaluation, would be the key to separating two fundamental classes of problems: those computable quickly (P), and those computable in low space (L). Mertz, along with of Toronto, builds on their earlier work to show a low-space algorithm for Tree Evaluation, thus refuting this belief. In particular, their technique has attracted attention for shedding new light on the power of space-bounded computation, suggesting novel approaches to age-old questions in complexity theory. They show that space can be used in surprising ways, with the same memory serving many simultaneous purposes.
The paper, which Mertz will present at the , has been invited to the special issue of for the conference. STOC is the main conference of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and one of the two premier venues for theoretical computer science, with only the top results being invited for publication in the special issue.
Mertz has also presented this work at many venues, including the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Columbia University, Oxford University, Warwick (, McGill University, and others.
Latest academic promotions
We are happy to announce two recent promotions in the department effective from 1 August 2024:
- Dr Amina Asif has been promoted to Assistant Professor
- Dr Andrew Hague has been promoted to Associate Professor
Many congratulations to our colleagues for their achievements!
SIGMOD 2024 Test of Time Award for 鈥楶rivBayes鈥
The work of Professor Graham Cormode has been recognized with a 鈥渢est of time鈥 award. The ACM SIGMOD conference presents an award each year for the paper from SIGMOD 10-12 years previously that has had the biggest impact, and passed the 鈥渢est-of-time鈥. The 2014 paper 鈥淧rivBayes: private data release via bayesian networks鈥 (Jun Zhang, Graham Cormode, Cecilia M. Procopiuc, Divesh Srivastava, Xiaokui Xiao) was selected for this honour. The award will be presented at the 2024 ACM SIGMOD Conference in Santiago.
Best Paper Award at IPDPS 2024

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 .