Vijay Nagarajan

I am delighted to announce the appointment of Vijayanand Nagarajan to a lectureship in Informatics, funded by the Numerical Algorithms and Intelligent Software Centre.

Vijay 's research interests lie in the areas of compilers, computer architecture and software engineering. He plans to work within ICSA on problems that span these areas. He plays cricket, violin and electric guitar.

Vijay received his MS degree in Computer Science from the University of Arizona in 2005. He spent the summer of 2006 as a research intern at the Intel Programming Systems Laboratory, and has studied for his PhD under the direction of Prof. Rajiv Gupta, in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Riverside. His dissertation proposes an efficient and programmable runtime monitoring approach for multicores, which can be used to increase the performance and reliability of parallel programs running on such architectures.

Vijay expects to defend his PhD in August 2009, and will then join the school in October.

Elham Kashefi

We are pleased to announce that Elham Kashefi will be appointed to a Lecturership in the School of Informatics, from 1^st October.

Elham received her BSc. and MSc. degrees, in Mathematics (Major in Combinatorics), from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. In 1999 she joined Imperial College of London as a research assistant in the formal methods and programming language group.

She started her Ph.D. in 2000 under the supervision of Vlatko Vedral and graduated from department of computing, Imperial College in 2003. Her thesis was on complexity analysis and semantics for quantum computing.

She was then awarded a four-year junior research fellowship at Christ Church College, Oxford to work on foundational structures for quantum information and computation. During this period she spent 2005 in Canada as a post doctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, to work on depth complexity and parallel computing. From March 2006 until 2007 she was a visiting scientist at MIT, in the Department of Theoretical Physics, exploring the connection between measurement-based models, adiabatic and topological quantum computing.

Elham has recently been awarded a five-year EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship, which she will hold at Edinburgh, to allow her to focus on measurement-based quantum computing and its relation to other quantum models.

Elham's current research interests include: formalising physical computations, classical cryptography secure against quantum attacks, models of quantum computing and their structural relations, and exploring new applications, algorithms and protocols for quantum computing.

Graham Steel

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Graham Steel to a lectureship in Informatics, with effect from 1st October.

Graham's PhD work concerned the automated discovery of cryptographic security protocol attacks by refutation of inductive conjectures. This led to the development of the Coral system, and the discovery of several previously unknown attacks on group protocols.

Graham is curently a research fellow in the field of Automated Mathematical Reasoning. Working on the EPSRC-funded project "Automated Analysis of Security Critical Systems". He develops and applies formal tools to analyse APIs of hardware security modules. These devices are used, for example, in ATM (cash machine) networks and electronic payment systems, and recently organized the First International Workshop on the Analysis of Security APIs.

Graham has held visiting appointments at the Università degli Studi di Genova, and the Universität Karlsruhe, and will be spending 2008 at INRIA in Paris.

Sharon Goldwater

We are delighted to announce that Sharon Goldwater has accepted a lectureship in Informatics at Edinburgh, with effect from October.

Sharon graduated from Brown University in Providence, RI, in May '98 with an Sc.B. in mathematics- computer science and a strong interest in linguistics. From 1998-2000, she worked as a researcher in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford Research International (SRI), where she developed telephone-based and multi-modal dialogue systems.

Sharon then returned to Brown, where she received her Sc.M. (2005) in Computer Science, and Ph.D. (2006). Her thesis, supervised by Mark Johnson in the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, developed non-parametric Bayesian models for unsupervised learning of linguistic structure.

In 2006 she joined the Stanford natural language processing group as a visiting post-doctoral scholar. There she has continued her work on unsupervised language learning and cognitive modelling, as well as investigating the effects of prosody on speech recognizer errors.

Sharon's current research interests include unsupervised learning, computational modelling of human language acquisition (especially phonology and morphology), and Bayesian models of language.

Richard Mayr

We are pleased to announce that Richard Mayr will be joining Informatics in October, as a lecturer.

Richard received his MSc in Computer Science from the TU-Müunchen, Germany, in 1994. In 1998 he obtained his PhD in Formal Methods (Model Checking Infinite-State Systems) from the TU-München, Germany.

During postdoctoral stints at the University of Edinburgh (UK) in 1999 and the University Paris 7 (France) in 2000, he worked on semantic equivalences. He joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Freiburg (Germany) in 2001. There he extended his research area to infinite real-time and probabilistic systems and received a postdoctoral degree ("Habilitation") in 2002.

In 2004 he moved to Raleigh, NC, USA, to join the department of Computer Science at NC State University as assistant professor.

His current research interests include Petri nets and process algebra, model checking and semantic equivalences, efficient algorithms for the verification of real-time and probabilistic systems, Markov chains, Markov reward models and stochastic games.

Victor Lavrenko

We are pleased to announce that Victor Lavrenko will be joining the School as a lecturer in October.

Victor received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2004. His dissertation focused on a generative framework for modeling relevance in Information Retrieval. In 2005 he joined the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at UMass as a post-doctoral research associate, working on statistical models for searching large semi-structured databases. From 2006 Victor worked as a language technology consultant for the Credit Suisse Group. He has served as a co-chair of a HLT/NAACL 2003 student workshop and gave a tutorial on language modeling techniques at the SIGIR 2003 conference. Since 2000, he has served as a reviewer for SIGIR, CIKM, NAACL/HLT, IJCAI and NIPS conferences.

Victor's current research interests include formal models for searching text in multiple languages, annotating and retrieving images, and detecting and tracking novel events in the news.

Dr. Michael Herrmann

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Michael Herrmann will be joining the School as a Lecturer, in September this year.

J. Michael Herrmann received a Diploma in Mathematics in 1988 and, in 1993, a doctoral degree in Computer Science, both from Leipzig University.

He has held post-doctoral positions at NORDITA, Copenhagen, and at RIKEN's Laboratory for Information Representation in Japan. From 1996 to 2001, he was with the Max-Planck Institute for Fluid Dynamics at Goettingen, Germany. In 2002 he became an assistant professor at Goettingen University.

Dr. Herrmann is currently an associated researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and a principal investigator at the Goettingen Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience.

His research is focused on learning theory in autonomous agents and behavioral neuroscience, machine learning, and dynamics of neural systems.

Dr. Subramanian Ramamoorthy (Ram)

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Subramanian Ramamoorthy will be joining the School as a Lecturer, in September this year.

Ram comes to us from the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin, where he recently obtained his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, under the supervision of Prof. Benjamin Kuipers. Previously, he graduated with an ME degree from the University of Virginia in 1999, and a BE from Bangalore University in 1996.

From 1999 to 2007, Ram was a member of the research and development team at National Instruments Corp. in Austin, Texas, working in the areas of computer vision, motion control and dynamic simulation.

He is primarily interested in the use of intelligent computing and machine learning to solve problems involving complex dynamical systems. He has made contributions to robotics and autonomous agent design. He is also interested in using similar techniques to address questions involving integrative and systems approaches to biology.

Lectureship and Readership in Algorithms and Complexity

The University of Edinburgh invites applications from candidates with research of international standing in Algorithms and/or Complexity, for appointment to a Lectureship (reference 3006910 corresponding approximately to US Assistant Professor) and Readership (reference 3006911 corresponding approximately to US Associate Professor). The successful candidates will become members of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science within the School of Informatics.

We welcome applications from candidates with research interests and achievements in any area of Algorithms and Complexity, including, for example, computational complexity, randomized algorithms, approximation algorithms, data structures, combinatorial optimization, cryptography, distributed algorithms and complex systems.

• Lecturership Appointment will be within Grade 8: (£32,795 - £39,160)
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• Readership Appointment will be within Grade 9: (£41,544 - £46,758)
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Closing Date: 2007-03-02