new appointments

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.