Department of CS newsletter

Over the last few weeks, some really interesting events took place on campus led by/centrally involving CS colleagues.

Security for all in an AI enabled society

On July 4th, Lucas Cordeiro, Mustafa A. Mustafa, and Edoardo Manino welcomed researchers from various UK institutions to discuss recent achievements and future initiatives to build trustworthy AI systems. In particular, they discussed the challenges at the intersection between artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber-security and how to tackle our main obstacles to achieving widespread adoption of trusted and secure AI systems. https://enncore.github.io/events/secaiws/

As one outcome of this workshop, the organisers look forward to establishing new partnerships/collaborations to demonstrate the viability of different research approaches funded under the EPSRC call "Security for all in an AI-enabled society".

Thanks to Noriko Griffiths, who helped with the organisation of this workshop.

Centre for Digital Trust and Society Meeting

It was also great to see so many CS colleagues involved in the Centre for Digital Trust and Society Meeting on July 6th in the Hyatt. Danny, Sophia, André, Louise, Emily, Mustafa were amongst those involved in a very successful (and hugely well attended) event.

The Centre is currently leading a bid (with lots of CS involvement) to become an Academic Centre of Excellence for Cyber Security Research (https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/files/ACE-CSR_Call-2023_v1.0.pdf). This is a very important call as accreditation is vital for UKRI funding in this area. If you’re interested in being involved (and currently aren’t) please do contact Danny or Mustafa.

Finally, Interviews for the Robotics posts are taking place w/c July 24th. We received 120 applications for two posts (one in CS, one in EEE) and have managed to whittle that number down to 10 for interview. I will keep you posted…

Best wishes

Andrew

Zahra and her colleagues won the Best Paper Award at EGSR 2023 in Delft, Netherlands for their work entitled "A Practical and Hierarchical Yarn-Based Shading Model for Cloth". They also won the Best Visual Award which together are the only two awards that were awarded during the conference in July 2023 and the paper is also published as a journal at CGF. Their paper was implemented in the production to generate realistic cloth for the movie "Avatar: The Way of Water" released in Dec 2022. Attached is a frame showing the character's clothing rendered using their new proposed model which is more realistic while being faster to render.

National Cyber Force: OFFICIAL Research Challenges (Pre-Call)

The National Cyber Force (NCF) will be inviting research proposals through the North West Partnership for Security and Trust (NWPST) looking at a number of interdisciplinary research challenges. Projects can be up to £75K (100% FEC) per project per year (projects can be up to 3 years in duration). The NCF are interested in a mix of short-term and long-term research. This opportunity is available to researchers at the universities of Lancaster, Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan and Salford. For further information, the NCF has published National Cyber Force: Responsible Power in Practice, a document that sets out the NCF's strategy on delivering responsible cyber operations to support the UK's national security priorities. Please email nwpst@manchester.ac.uk with subject line "NCF Research Call" for details.