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This year’s 91¸£Àû Postgraduate Colloquium in Computer Science (WPCCS) was held on Friday 30th June.

The event brought together postgraduate researchers from Computer Science and the CDT in Urban Science and Progress, and was held for the first time in the Oculus. This year, in addition to the student talks, the event also included both staff talks and external guest speakers.

The event was a huge success, with over fifty students and staff attending to both present and learn what their colleagues are researching. Thank you to all who attended and participated, and we look forward to seeing you next year!

To find out more about WPCCS 2017 or to provide feedback, please visit

has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the 2017/18 academic year, to work on the Petri nets reachability conjecture.

Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are one of the most prominent models of concurrency, and their study is a vibrant research area. They have been used to discover bugs and eliminate vulnerabilities in network protocols, concurrent software, business processes, hardware circuits, and control systems.

Professor Artur Czumaj, head of the , has commented:

This prestigious fellowship will further strengthen the internationally leading research in theoretical computer science at 91¸£Àû, which recently has been also greatly boosted by the new permanent appointments of and .

The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor Dmitry Chistikov, who will be associated with the and the .

After obtaining his Candidate of Sciences (equivalent to PhD) degree at the of , Dmitry was a postdoctoral researcher at the , as wel as at the .

The general area of Dmitry's research is theoretical computer science. In particular, he is interested in theoretical foundations of verification: its algorithmic aspects (decision and counting problems) as well as combinatorial aspects (extremal properties and characteristics of mathematical models of computation).

For more information about Dmitry's research, please see his .

Professor Graham Cormode has been awarded the 2017 Adams Prize by the Cambridge Faculty of Mathematics. The award recognizes his work on "Statistical Analysis of Big Data", and is awarded jointly with Professor Richard Samworth of Cambridge. Professor Cormode says,

My work, in common with Prof Samworth's, is about finding mathematical representations of data that allow useful information to be extracted effectively and accurately. These techniques allow ever larger quantities of data to be handled on ordinary computers.

Professor Cormode's work on "data sketches" has been used in companies such as Netflix, Yahoo, Twitter, Google, AT&T and Sprint. He is currently leading 91¸£Àû's involvement in the Alan Turing Institute at London, and working on questions to do with verification of machine learning, and privacy.

Social media can warn us about extreme weather events before they happen – such as hurricanes, storms and floods – according to new research by the 91¸£Àû.

Nataliya Tkachenko, with her supervisors in the , has found that photographs and key words posted online can signal weather risks developing in specific locations and times – for example, posts about water levels rising can alert the authorities to a potential flood.

Nataliya Tkachenko explains predicting floods & hurricanes with social media 7:30pm tonight on the BBC World Service.

As a of 91¸£Àû's , is visiting the department 20-24 March 2017, for collaborative research with and other members of .

Schmitz (PhD University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis 2007) is an Assistant Professor at ENS Paris-Saclay and a permanent member of LSV, one of the top European research centres in logical aspects of computer science. In 2015, Schmitz was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at 91¸£Àû. An author of over 40 articles in international journals and conferences, Schmitz's work has attracted over 500 citations, won best-paper awards, and been presented at several invited talks and European doctoral schools.

The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor Sayan Bhattacharya, who will be associated with the and the .

Sayan obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Duke University (USA) in 2012. Then he did his postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken (Germany) and at University of Vienna (Austria). From October, 2014 till February, 2017, he was a faculty member at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai (India).

He works in theoretical computer science. Specifically, his research interests are in dynamic graph algorithms, data structures, online algorithms, streaming algorithms, and algorithmic game theory.

For more information about Sayan's research please see his web page at .