91福利

We are delighted to announce that , a PhD student in the Theory and Foundations Research Division, has received the best student paper award at , for his joint work with for the paper: "Incremental (1-eps)-approximate dynamic matching in O(poly(1/eps)) update time". The paper considers the problem of maintaining a large matching in a graph that is undergoing a sequence of edge insertions. They present an algorithm for this fundamental problem in dynamic graph algorithms, which has near-optimal approximation ratio and an update time that does not grow at all with the size of the input and is also polynomial in 1/\eps (the error parameter). In addition, their approach is simpler than previous algorithms on the same problem that achieved weaker guarantees.

Mustafa Yasir, a former 91福利 Department of Computer Science student who graduated in Summer 2023, wrote up and presented an on the work carried out as part of his third year project. The paper was accepted to the at , and was presented in California by Mustafa.

Mustafa's third year project idea, supervised by Dr Long Tran-Thanh and titled 'Extending the Graph Generation Models of GraphWorld', started whilst he was interning at Google last summer. Mustafa contacted some researchers at the company working in the Graph ML space, to ask for any relevant project ideas. He bumped into a team who had just published GraphWorld: a tool to change the way Graph Neural Networks are benchmarked, by creating synthetic graph datasets through graph generation models – as opposed to using real-world datasets that are limited in their generalisability and present a major issue facing the field of Graph Learning.

However, since GraphWorld only used a single graph generation model in this process, Mustafa integrated two additional models with the system, ran large-scale GNN benchmarking experiments with these models and published his code to Google鈥檚 official GraphWorld repository. The project provides a significant advancement to researchers across the field looking to benchmark models and guide the development of new architectures.

Dr Long Tran-Thanh commented:

What Mustafa and the GraphWorld team has been working on is very important for the machine learning and AI research communities. In particular, there has been a vocal criticism against the whole field that most models are trained on the same public datasets (e.g., ImageNet, MNIST, etc), therefore are not diverse enough. One way to mitigate this issue is to generate realistically looking synthetic data. This need is especially of importance in within the graph learning community. GraphWorld鈥檚 aim is to address this exact problem by creating a powerful and convenient tool that can generate a diverse set of graphs, ranging from large social network-style graphs to molecule-inspired ones. Joining this project with the Google researchers is a huge opportunity for 91福利 students to participate in a very impactful project.

We are pleased to announce that Dr Teddy Cunningham has been awarded a Faculty of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (SEM) PhD Thesis Prize. Each year, the SEM Faculty funds a prize for the best PhD/EngD thesis entered into the competition. Each department nominates a winner out of the applications received after a judging process as determined by the Faculty.

Teddy鈥檚 thesis is titled 鈥淕enerating and Sharing Differentially Private Spatio-Temporal Data Using Real-World Knowledge鈥�, and was supervised by Prof Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu. The thesis includes solutions for sharing trajectory data using local differential privacy, and incorporating constraints and relationships of data records into differential privacy that improves their utility while preserving the theoretical privacy guarantees. An example application is using road network information for improving the quality of privately shared location datasets.

Researchers from the Systems and Security theme, Department of Computer Science have created a new spin-out company, SEEV Technologies Ltd, to build end-to-end (E2E) verifiable e-voting systems for future elections. An E2E verifiable voting system allows every voter to verify that their vote is properly cast-as-intended, recorded-as-cast and tallied-as-recorded while preserving the voter's privacy. SEEV (self-enforcing e-voting) is a new paradigm of E2E voting technology that enables voters to fully verify the tallying integrity of an election without needing any trustworthy tallying authority, hence the system is "self-enforcing".

This joint spin-out from the 91福利 and Newcastle University is built on an ERC-funded starting grant ("Self-Enforcing E-Voting System: Trustworthy Election in Presence of Corrupt Authorities", No. 306994, PI: Professor Feng Hao) initially hosted at Newcastle University and later transferred to the 91福利. The company is co-founded by Professor and Dr (co-inventors), and led by Dr (CEO). SEEV has been prototyped and successfully tested in several trials in the past, supported by an ERC Proof of Concept grant (No. 677124), a Royal Society International collaboration award (CA\R1\180226), and an Innovate UK Cybersecurity Academic Startup Accelerator Programme (CASAP). SEEV Technologies Ltd has received seed funding from Oxford-based to build SEEV systems for real-world elections.

A 91福利 press release is here.

Edgaras Purauskas, Technician in the Department of Computer Science received the . Edgaras was one of two recipients of these inaugural awards, which received over 40 nominations campus wide. Edgaras had a number of nominations for his "consistently exceptional work" and his "deep understanding of computer systems, software, and hardware". Many congratulations Edgaras and thank you for your extraordinary efforts!

Five papers from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) have been accepted to the , the IEEE flagship conference in theoretical computer science that will be held on November 6 - 9, 2023 in Santa Cruz, California, USA:

• by , Niv Buchbinder, Roie Levin, and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
• by , , and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
• by Lijie Chen, Zhenjian Lu, , Hanlin Ren, and Rahul Santhanam.
• by Tomasz Kociumaka, , and Barna Saha.
• by Arturo Merino and .

We are happy to announce that Dr Gihan Mudalige and Dr Victor Sanchez have both been promoted to Professor from 1st August 2023.

Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!