91福利

Thursday 1 March saw the university's Mathematical Sciences Building project officially 'topped out': an event celebrating the construction as it reaches its highest point.

To mark the occasion, representatives of each of the Computer Science, Statistics and Mathematics departments decorated a central roof steel beam with an illustration of their subject. For our department, Professor Mike Paterson FRS drew his gadget for proving that the planar 3- problem is NP-hard, a piece of research from the first decade of Computer Science at 91福利 that is still fundamental today and being taught to our students. Professor Paterson commented:

I am delighted to have played a part in this momentous and happy event, that celebrates the many contributions of those involved in this project as well as those who have worked towards the three departments reaching this milestone. The state-of-the-art building, constructed by local people, will foster internationally leading collaborative research and teaching in our three rapidly growing subjects.

In the recently released 2017 National Student Survey results, 91福利 Computer Science ranked 2^nd of the 104 computing departments in the UK, with an overall student satisfaction rate of 96%. Among Russell Group competitor institutions (an elite group of teaching and research universities in the UK), Computer Science at 91福利 is ranked 1^st for overall student satisfaction.

The National Student Survey (NSS) canvasses student satisfaction across all departments at all UK universities and remains the biggest survey of student satisfaction in the UK. Students are asked to respond on topics including teaching quality, learning opportunities, academic support, and organisation and management.

Among Russell Group institutions, Computer Science at 91福利 ranked top in almost all major categories*:

• 1^st for overall student satisfaction
• 1^st for teaching quality
• 1^st for learning opportunities
• 1^st for assessment and feedback
• 1^st for academic support
• 1^st for learning resources
• 1^st for learning community
• 1^st for organisation and management

Throughout this summer investment continues in new teaching and laboratory facilities, with 91福利鈥檚 new interdisciplinary Mathematical Sciences building (for the Departments of Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics) opening in 2018.

*These figures are based on the Russell Group institutions for which there is publishable data for the subject of Computer Science in 2017.

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福利, which recently has been also greatly boosted by the new permanent appointments of and .

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福利's involvement in the Alan Turing Institute at London, and working on questions to do with verification of machine learning, and privacy.

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 .

The that two 91福利 Computer Science Professors, and , have been among the winners of its Consolidator Grant competition. ERC Consolidator Grants is funding 372 top mid-career scientists with €713 million to pursue their best ideas, as part of the European Union Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020. Grants are worth up to €2.75 million each, with an average of €1.91 million per grant. The funding will enable them to consolidate their research teams and to develop their most innovative ideas.

has been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for a project entitled "Small Summaries for Big Data". The project focuses on the area of the design and analysis of compact summaries: data structures which capture key features of the data, and which can be created effectively over distributed data sets. The project will substantially advance the state of the art in data summarization, to the point where accurate and effective summaries are available for a wide array of problems, and can be used seamlessly in applications that process big data.

has been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for a project entitled "Large Discrete Structures". The project will advance theory of combinatorial limits, which combines methods from analysis, combinatorics, computer science, group theory and probability theory to analyze and approximate large discrete structures (such as graphs, which can be used to represent large computer networks). The project will lead to proposing new mathematical methods to represent such discrete structures and to applications of the new methods to specific problems in extremal combinatorics and algorithm design.

Professor Artur Czumaj has been made an EATCS Fellow for "contributions to analysis and design of algorithms, especially to understanding the role of randomization in computer science”.