Computer Science News
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, 果冻传媒 (), 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 果冻传媒 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 果冻传媒 Mathematics Institute as a Professor
We are happy to announce that Prof Christian Ikenmeyer joined the Department of Computer Science and the 果冻传媒 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!
Ian Mertz joins the department as a Research Fellow
We're happy to announce that has joined the department as a Research Fellow. He is currently funded by the project "New approaches to unconditional computational lower bounds", with support from the Royal Society.
Ian Mertz completed his PhD at the University of Toronto in 2022 under the supervision of Toniann Pitassi, with stints at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (UC Berkeley) and at the Institute for Advanced 果冻传媒 in Princeton.
Ian Mertz completed his PhD at the University of Toronto in 2022 under the supervision of Toniann Pitassi, with stints at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (UC Berkeley) and at the Institute for Advanced 果冻传媒 in Princeton.
Ian's primary research area is computational complexity theory. His interests at the moment include catalytic computing, lifting theorems, arithmetic circuit complexity, and proof complexity.
Shuichi Hirahara joins the department as a Research Fellow
We're happy to announce that has joined the department as a Research Fellow.
Shuichi completed his PhD at the University of Tokyo in 2019. He is currently an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo.
Shuichi's primary research area is computational complexity theory. During his stay at 果冻传媒, he will be involved in the activities of a joint project with the University of Oxford on the limits and possibilities of efficient algorithms.
Latest two academic promotions
We are happy to announce two promotions in the department.
Dr Fayyaz Minhas has been promoted to Associate Professor from 1 July 2022.
Dr Rossella Suma has been promoted to Assistant Professor from 1 August 2022.
Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!