News and Commmunity

• Professor Robert Merton, Harvard Business School, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics, gave the 2010 Kolmogorov Lecture: Observations on the Science of Finance in the Practice of Finance: Past, Present, and Future at Royal Holloway on 23 February 2010.
• December 2009: Congratulations to Elizabeth Scott on her appointment as Professor and to Kostas Stathis on his appointment as Reader!
• Local student wins Scholarship Challenge. Peter Blay, a local student from Strode's College, won the Scholarship Challenge for 2008, worth £1,000 in 08-09, his first year of study, and renewable in subsequent years.
• National Student Satisfaction Survey - the Department came second among all CS departments in the UK with a satisfaction rating of 97%.
• "Intelligent scriptwriting"
  Fionn Murtagh's ground-breaking new technology in joint work with the Media Arts Department features in Nature (5 June 2008). Further discussion of the mathematical data mining algorithms can be found in the article, The Structure of Narrative: the Case of Film Scripts, by Fionn Murtagh, Adam Ganz and Stewart McKie, which is forthcoming in the journal Pattern Recognition
• Comp Sci student Andrew Walker won last year's 3rd Year Poster Project Competition. His poster was entitled "Intra-AS Routing Protocol and Algorithm Simulation"
• Thinking SAFE. Pedro Contreras, PhD researcher works with Thinking SAFE
• Inaugural Lecture, RHUL, 22 Feb. 2007
  "Thinking Ultrametrically: Understanding Massive Data Sets and Navigating Information Spaces" Fionn Murtagh. Streamed video of the presentation, and of the lecture, and text of the vote of thanks.
• Gregory Gutin was invited to give a plenary lecture at the International Conference on Discrete Mathematics (ICDM 2006), jointly organised by the Ramanujan Mathematical Society and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.
• Alexander Clark has won the Tenjinno Machine Translation Competition.
• Computer Science Department staff, Alexander Clark, Christophe Costa Florencio and Chris Watkins won the Best Paper Award at the European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) for their paper entitled "Languages as Hyperplanes: Grammatical Inference with String Kernels."
• Fionn Murtagh has been elected as President of the Classification Society of North America for a 2-year term in 2008 and 2009. Leadership of the North American scholarly organisation is a prestigious appointment. The CSNA is a nonprofit interdisciplinary organization whose purposes are to promote the scientific study of classification and clustering. Research interests of the CSNA include data analysis in mathematical psychology, forensics and linguistic clustering and classification.
• Victor Solovyev has been involved in a large international consortium which has unravelled the 236-million-base genome of the European honey bee - Apis mellifera. He was one of 150 scientists from 15 countries to work on this major project, the results of which have been published in Nature (26 October 2006).

Recently Awarded Grants:

• Prof Fionn Murtagh - New Mathematical Approaches for Structuring, and Searching Through, Very Large Compressed, Encrypted, Textual Data Stores (EPSRC Industrial CASE with Thinking Safe)
• Dr Kostas Stathis - 3D Modelling of Agent-Based Web-Services for E-retailing Project (London Development Agency)
• Prof Gregory Gutin - Parameterized Problems on Directed Graphs (EPSRC)
• Prof Zhaohui Luo - Type-Theorectic Foundation of Mathematical Pluralism (Leverhulme Trust)
• Prof Dave Cohen - Tractability of Constraint Problems: Unification, Extension and Applicability (EPSRC)
• Dr Chris Watkins, with the School of Biological Sciences, RHUL - Amorphous Computation, Random Graphs and Complex Biological Networks (EPSRC)
• Dr Alex Clark - Grammatical inference with string kernels and latent structure techniques (EU PASCAL (Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and Computational Learning) network)
• Prof Alex Gammerman, with University College London - Proteomic analysis of the Human Serum Proteome for Population Screening, Diagnosis and Biomarker Discovery (MRC)
• Prof Fionn Murtagh - Multiple Scale and Multimodal Data and Information Fusion in Human Sensory Discrimination (BBSRC)
• Dr Robin Adams - Reverse Mathematics in Dependent Type Theory (EPSRC Post Doctoral Fellowship)
• Dr Zhiyuan Luo - Machine Learning for Resource Management in Next-Generation Optical Networks (EPSRC)
• Dr Kostas Stathis - Argumentation as a Foundation for the Semantic Grid (EU)