Computer Science News
Promotion to Assistant Professor
We are happy to share the news that Dr Alex Dixon has been promoted to the position of Assistant Professor, effective from 1 May 2023. Alex joined our department as a Teaching Fellow in September 2021, while still completing his PhD research. Despite juggling both roles, he has made significant contributions to the department's activities. Many congratulations to Alex for his accomplishments in completing his PhD research and for earning this well-deserved promotion.
Amina Asif joins the department as a Teaching Fellow
We are happy to announce that Dr Amina Asif has joined the Department of Computer Science as a Teaching Fellow. Amina has previously worked with us as part of the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) centre, where her research focussed on weak supervision and model robustness in Computational Pathology. We welcome her to the department!
Prof. Adi Shamir receives Honorary Doctorate from 91福利
(Weizmann Institute of Science), the world-renowned cryptographer and a recipient of the 2002 (the highest honour in computer science received jointly with and ), visited our campus in January 2023 to collect an Honorary Doctorate from the 91福利. During his visit, Prof. Shamir gave also a research talk at the DIMAP seminar and CS Colloquium entitled "Efficient Detection of High Probability Cryptanalytic Properties of Boolean Functions."
Prof. Shamir has been known in 91福利 since 1976, when he spent a year as a post-doc with our own . Directly after 91福利 Prof. Shamir went to MIT, where together with Adleman and Rivest he invented the famous RSA public-key cryptography algorithm for encoding and decoding messages, used nowadays by millions to securely transmit messages over the internet. The work on RSA has been immensely influential and led to the 2002 A.M. Turing Award for the three co-inventors, cited for the 鈥渋ngenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice.鈥� Other noticeable awards (for RSA and other numerous contributions to cryptography and computing) received by Prof. Shamir include the 2000 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, the Israel Mathematical Union Erd艖s Prize in Mathematics (1983), the Vatican Pontifical Academy PIUS XI Gold Medal (1992), the Association for Computing Machinery Paris Kannellakis Theory and Practice Award (1996), the Israel Prize in Computer Science (2008), and the Japan Prize in the field of electronics, information, and technology (2017), and the Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2018).
Complexity breakthrough by Dr Shuichi Hirahara
Dr Shuichi Hirahara, a research fellow affiliated with the Theory and FoundationsLink opens in a new window group and an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, has made a significant advance towards our understanding of the limits and possibilities of efficient computations. In his recent paper "", published at the 63rd IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2022), Dr Hirahara established the NP-hardness of learning efficient programs and of estimating the circuit complexity of an explicitly given partial Boolean function. The main result of the paper addresses a question that dates back to the pioneering work of Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin on the theory of NP-completeness from the 1970s.
The new result has been presented at several institutions, including UT Austin, Columbia University, 91福利 (), MIT, and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley. The latter is running a semester-long program on "" that is closely related to Hirahara's recent contributions.
You can read more about it at the popular Computational Complexity Blog, where the discovery has been named "" (see also ).
Outstanding MSc students
The department would like to congratulate our 2021-2022 MSc students on their end-of-year results. Additional congratulations go to the following outstanding students, who have been awarded academic prizes:
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Promotion to Associate Professor
We are happy to announce that Dr Shan Raza has been promoted to Associate Professor from 1 January 2023. Since joining 91福利 in 2019, he has made a significant contribution to the activities of the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) Centre and the PathLAKE initiative. Many congratulations to Shan for his achievements!
Christian Ikenmeyer joins the Department of Computer Science and the 91福利 Mathematics Institute as a Professor
We are happy to announce that Prof Christian Ikenmeyer joined the Department of Computer Science and the 91福利 Mathematics Institute on October 1st 2022. In his research, he combines ideas and challenges from theoretical computer science, algorithmic algebra, algebraic complexity theory, algebraic geometry, representation theory, and algebraic combinatorics. We welcome him to the department!