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Colleagues, friends, family and former students of Professor Roland Wilson gathered last Friday to celebrate his life and to inaugurate a bench in his memory. The bench is located outside the Department, surrounded by daisies at this time of year, overlooking the lake and the fountains.

Roland's son and daughter toured the Department and visited one of the research groups which is building on Roland’s intellectual legacy under the leadership of his former PhD student Nasir Rajpoot (now a Professor in the Department). Dr Abhir Bhalerao, also a former student and close colleague of Roland, said a few words about Roland's contribution to our community and his lasting importance to us. Head of Department Professor Yulia Timofeeva cut a ribbon on the bench before we all returned to the common room to share memories and anecdotes.

Although an emotional occasion for many of us, it was very nice to be able to gather together again after the restrictions of the last two years and to remember Roland and his legacy.

We are happy to announce that Dr Dmitry Chistikov has been promoted to Associate Professor from 1 April 2022. Since joining ¹û¶³´«Ã½ in 2017, Dmitry has made a significant contribution to the department with his research, teaching, and administrative and supportive roles. Many congratulations to Dmitry for all his achievements!

Congratulations to Harita Dellaporta for receiving the at the premier conference in Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2022 for her paper on Robust Bayesian Inference for Simulator-based Models via the MMD Posterior Bootstrap.

We are pleased to report that members of the department's Theory and Foundations research theme have had four papers accepted to the (STOC 2022), the ACM flagship conference in theoretical computer science. The papers are:

• "Deterministic Massively Parallel Connectivity" by Sam Coy and .
• "Improved Approximation Guarantees for Shortest Superstrings using Cycle Classification by Overlap to Length Ratios", by , Nicolaos Matsakis, and Pavel Veselý.
• "Hypercontractivity on High Dimensional Expanders" by , Noam Lifshitz, and Siqi Liu.
• "Worst-Case to Average-Case Reductions via Additive Combinatorics" by Vahid R. Asadi, Alexander Golovnev, , and Igor Shinkar.

We are delighted to announce that Peter Kiss, a PhD student in the Theory and Foundations Research Division, has won the Best Student Paper Award at the conference for his single-author paper on "Deterministic Dynamic Matching in Worst-Case Update Time". Computing a maximum matching in a graph is one of the most fundamental problems in design and analysis of algorithms. The paper makes important progress on this problem in a setting where the input graph is changing over time via a sequence updates, and one wishes to maintain a large matching efficiently in such a dynamic graph. Along the way, the paper develops a general purpose technique for converting any dynamic algorithm with amortised update time into one with worst-case update time, provided the initial algorithm is able to handle a more general form of batch updates.

Members of the High-Performance and Scientific Computing Group (HPSC) at the department of Computer Science has won a best paper award at the . The winning paper titled , develops a novel representative (mini-)application, specifically designed to model coupled execution of multi-physics numerical simulation codes from the CFD domain. The mini-coupler, CPX, is the first of its kind, combining multiple CFD mini-app instances to predict the run-time and scaling behaviour of large scale coupled CFD simulations, on modern multi-core and many-core clusters such as used for production turbomachinery design at Rolls-Royce plc. The work was carried out by PhD candidate, Archie Powell, in collaboration with Kabir Choudry, Arun Prabhakar, and Gihan Mudalige at the Department of CS ¹û¶³´«Ã½,  (University of Surrey),  (PPCU) and  (University of Birmingham).

The work was funded by the and Rolls-Royce plc.

Dr. Gihan Mudalige at the ¹û¶³´«Ã½â€™s Department of Computer Science have been awarded an as part of a consortium of researchers including the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC), universities of ¹û¶³´«Ã½, Newcastle, Cambridge, Southampton and led by Imperial College London.

This 3 year, £2.6M project brings together communities from the and the to ensure a smooth transition to exascale computing, with the aim to develop transformative techniques for advancing their production simulation software ecosystems dedicated to the study of turbulent flows. It is part of the (Exascale Computing ALgorithms and Infrastructures Benefiting UK Research) programme, aimed at delivering the next generation of high-performance simulation software for the highest-priority fields in UK research.