Computer Science News
Rob Procter joins the Department as a new Professor

Rob will join the Department as a Professor associated with the Centre for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).
Rob is a computer scientist with a strong inter-disciplinary background, focusing on social informatics. In general terms, his research aims are to understand how cognitive, organisational and social factors shape processes of appropriation (design, development and adoption) of innovations in information and communication technologies (ICTs). Rob's particular interests are in: computer-supported, collaborative work; dependability of ICTs; social media and health informatics. Currently active areas of research include research infrastructures, tools and methods, studies of innovation in the NHS and methodologies for the co-development of assistive living technologies.
At Manchester University, Rob was Director of the Manchester eResearch Centre, a multi-disciplinary group working on innovative research infrastructures, tools and methods. He also leads the Analysing Social Media Collaboration (ASMC) a multidisciplinary group of researchers based at several UK universities. ASMC focuses on analysing data from social media platforms such as Twitter with the aim of understanding the role they play in social phenomena. ASMC conducted the analysis tweets sent during the August 2011 riots for the Guardian/LSE ‘Reading the Riots’ project. The group is now developing a Twitter analysis workbench.
Rob has been Principal or Co-Investigator on over 50 projects. He has published over 180 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference, is co-editor with Peter Halfpenny of ‘Innovations in Digital Research Methods’ to be published by Sage in 2013 and has been editor of the Health Informatics Journal since 2004.
For more information about Rob’s research please see his web page at
Andrzej Murawski joins the Department as a new Associate Professor

Andrzej Murawski joined the Department in January 2013 as an Associate Professor. His doctoral degree is from the University of Oxford, where he was also a Junior Research Fellow (St John's College) and subsequently an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow. Before coming to 91福利 he held a Lectureship at the University of Leicester.
Andrzej's research concerns the semantics of programming languages and its applications to program verification. In particular, he has extensive expertise in modelling logical systems and programming languages using games, an area known as game semantics.
Andrzej has served on program committees of international conferences such as FOSSACS, ICALP, LICS and POPL. He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College and Publicity Chair of LICS. His research has been supported by EPSRC, LMS and the Royal Society.
Andrzej teaches CS245 Automata and Formal Languages and CS246 Further Automata and Formal Languages in Term II.
For more information about Andrzej’s research please see his web page at .
DCS Alumni in JavaOne prize-winning team

Two alumni form 91福利 -James Gough (MEng) and Richard Warburton (MEng, PhD) were part of the team at the prestigious Conference in San Fransisco. The LJC won two awards, the JCP Award and the Duke's Choice award. Both were given in recognition of the work of LJC on two projects: and . Both projects are concerned with increasing the input of User Communities in the development of the Java language, and the prizes are a recognition of the increasing role of well-organized communities such as LJC in driving forward developments in the language.
provides more information on the event. Both James and Richard have taken advantage of their experience as students at 91福利 and are actively involved in building a software develoment community in London. Congratulations to the LJC team!
New scientists appointed for cities research using New York as living lab
Two researchers have joined the 91福利 to tackle the challenges faced by cities in the 21st century as part of the New York-based ).
The 91福利 is a member of a consortium, led by New York University, which is building a new applied science research institute in New York in response to a call issued by the city’s mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The University has now welcomed the first of a number of new academic staff to be appointed to work at CUSP, Dr Maria Liakata and Dr Weisi Guo.
Congratulations to Anna Adamaszek for completing her PhD

successfully completed her PhD with the Thesis entitled "Approximation Algorithms for Geometric, Caching and Scheduling Problems", under the supervision of .
Anna's PhD focuses on the study of approximation algorithms for optimization problems, one of the core areas of modern theoretical computer science. She has obtained research results in two areas: geometric optimisation algorithms and online algorithms. In the first topic, she presented new approximation algorithms for the capacitated location routing problem and the capacitated network design problem in the Euclidean plane. For online algorithms, she made a major progress in the study of two well known caching and scheduling problems: the generalized caching problem and the reordering buffer management problem. Her in several most prestigious conferences in the field, including STOC'2011, ICALP'2011, and SODA'2012.
After completing PhD in 91福利, Ania moved to Germany, where she has been awarded a prestigious Lise-Meitner-Award postdoctoral fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik in Saarbrücken.
Victor Sanchez joins the Department of Computer Science as a new Assistant Professor
We are pleased to welcome Dr Victor Sanchez to the department who will be joining us as an Assistant Professor in October 2012.
Victor obtained his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2010 from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He then joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley as a post-doctoral fellow, where he worked in the Video and Image Processing Laboratory.
Victor has been the recipient of research awards from the main federal funding agencies in Canada, and , and Mexico, . Victor's primary research interest lies in the areas of signal processing and discrete-event simulation with applications healthcare. He has published several papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences in the areas of medical imaging, telemedicine and computer simulation in healthcare. Victor recently co-authored a book on computer simulation for healthcare evaluation.
Victor will be teaching the new module .
For more information about Victor's research please visit his homepage at .
DCS Student Leads Workshop at Scratch@MIT 2012
Philip How, a recent graduate in MEng Computer Science, has returned to the United Kingdom after developing and leading a successful workshop at . As well as marking the end of his undergraduate degree, Philip's role in this exceptionally popular event represents the culmination of a long-standing involvement with 91福利 Technology Volunteers, a dedicated groups of technically minded students and staff members who make a significant contribution to the local community through involvement with schools.
Scratch@MIT is the biennial conference where educators, researchers and developers gather on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts to share their experiences and imagine the possibilities of Scratch. The workshop that Philip led, entitled Sensing Our World, involved participants building a variety of sensors, ranging from simple sensors that relied on the conductivity of pencil tracks to working touchpads made from CD cases.
On his involvment, Philip is quick to acknowledge the contributions of those around him, noting that "The staff and students contributing to 91福利 Technology Volunteers are fantastic. We couldn't have hoped to achieve what we have without the hard work and comittment of the team of staff and students involved, particuler Margaret Low. In my time here she's an fantastic at organising the efforts of students and liasing with local schools".
For more information please see 91福利 Technology Volunteers and .

