果冻传媒

Neha Rino, a PhD student in the Theory and Foundations group in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Cyber Security group at WMG, has won an at FORMATS 2024.

The Oded Maler award is a distinction presented for the best paper of the International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems (FORMATS). of the conference was held in September in Calgary, Canada, jointly with QEST (International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems) as a common research forum dedicated to quantitative modelling, analysis, and verification.

Neha's paper, "", is co-authored with Mohammed Foughali and Eugene Asarin, both from and in Paris, France, where Neha completed the Master's degree (ENS Paris-Saclay) prior to joining 果冻传媒.

Neha's paper contributes to the research framework of quantitative monitoring, which is the analysis of individual executions of systems which yields numerical output (real numbers), rather than binary yes/no. The paper formulates and solves, by an efficient algorithm, a new problem of this kind: computing a real number that characterises to which extent the given execution of a satisfies its specification expressed in (STL).

PhD positions are available at the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) group in the , 果冻传媒, UK. The group has strong ties with the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP), established in 2007 jointly with the and . Together with DIMAP, the group is one of the leading theory groups in Europe, with regular publications in top international conferences and journals in theoretical computer science.

Eight papers authored by Computer Science researchers from 果冻传媒 have been accepted for publication at the , the leading international venue for machine learning research, which will be held on 10-15 December 2024 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada:

• Generating Origin-Destination Matrices in Neural Spatial Interaction Models, by Ioannis Zachos, Mark Girolami, and Theodoros Damoulas
• Interventionally Consistent Surrogates for Complex Simulation Models, by Joel Dyer, Nicholas Bishop, Yorgos Felekis, Fabio Massimo Zennaro, Ani Calinescu, Theodoros Damoulas, and Michael Wooldridge
• Learning the Expected Core of Strictly Convex Stochastic Cooperative Games, by Phuong Nam Tran, The Anh Ta, Shuqing Shi, Debmalya Mandal, Yali Du, and Long Tran-Thanh
• Physics-Informed Variational State-Space Gaussian Processes, by Oliver Hamelijnck, Arno Solin, and Theodoros Damoulas
• SARAD: Spatial Association-Aware Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis for Multivariate Time Series, by Zhihao Dai, Ligang He, Shuanghua Yang, and Matthew Leeke
• Symmetric Linear Bandits with Hidden Symmetry, by Phuong Nam Tran, The Anh Ta, Debmalya Mandal, and Long Tran-Thanh
• The Effectiveness of Surprisingly Popular Voting with Partial Preferences, by Hadi Hosseini, Debmalya Mandal, and Amrit Puhan
• What makes unlearning hard and what to do about it, by Kairan Zhao, Meghdad Kurmanji, George-Octavian B膬rbulescu, Eleni Triantafillou, and Peter Triantafillou

We are seeking PhD candidates in the topic of Multiagent Systems and related areas, with particular emphasis on one or more of: computational social choice, algorithmic game theory, multiagent learning, and social and economic networks. The multiagent systems researchers at 果冻传媒 include , , , Long Tran-Thanh, and .

The expected starting date is October 2025 or as soon as possible thereafter. The deadline for our internal application round is 1 November 2024. To apply, please fill out the (which will ask you to upload a CV and a letter of motivation). We aim to have interviews between November 11th and 22nd, 2024. Top-ranked candidates will be put forward for a fully funded position through the Computer Science Centre for Doctoral Training and Research (CDT) by January 15th 2025.

Many congratulations to Henry Sinclair-Banks for passing his PhD viva today, which was one of the shortest and best in the long memories of the examiners, from the University of Edinburgh, and our own Professor Ranko Lazic.

Six papers co-authored by DIMAP and Theory and Foundations researchers were presented earlier in July at , the 51st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming:

• Rohan Acharya, , : Lookahead Games and Efficient Determinisation of History-Deterministic B眉chi Automata,
• Dmitry Chistikov, Alessio Mansutti, Mikhail R. Starchak: ,
• , Guichen Gao, Shaofeng H.-C. Jiang, Robert Krauthgamer, Pavel Vesel媒: ,
• Argyrios Deligkas, Eduard Eiben, Robert Ganian, Iyad Kanj, : ,
• Julian D枚rfler, : ,
• , Rahul Santhanam: .

ICALP is the main conference and annual meeting of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (). took place in Tallinn, Estonia, on the 8th to 12th of July 2024.

Dmitry's paper "" won the Best Paper Award of ICALP's Track B, which is a flagship research meeting on Automata, Logic, Semantics, and Theory of Programming. The paper studies the following problem: given a system of linear equations and constraints of the form y=2^x, does it have a solution over the natural numbers? By using and extending a method that generalises , Dmitry and his co-authors Alessio Mansutti and Mikhail Starchak show that the problem belongs to . This result provides a way to efficiently certify the existence of a solution, even if all solutions are very big (towers of exponentials).

This is the second time in a row that this award goes to a 果冻传媒 paper: Henry Sinclair-Banks, a DIMAP PhD student, was an awardee in 2023.

We are happy to announce that Dr Florin Ciucu (CS), Dr Long Tran-Thanh (CS) and Dr Paul Jenkins (Statistics and CS) have been promoted to Professor, effective 1st August 2024.

Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!