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Commendation for PhD graduate in thesis competition

Posted on 5 November 2015

A graduate from the University of York’s Computer Science Department has been highly commended in a national PhD thesis competition.

Furqan Aziz

Furqan Aziz  is one of two highly commended runners up in the national competition run by the BCS, the Chartered Institute for Information Technology.

He is the third PhD student from York to be commended in the competition, which has been running since 1990.

During his PhD, Furqan conducted research in the area of spectral graph theory and its applications to computer vision and pattern recognition.

His thesis tackles an important topic in computer vision and pattern recognition from the perspective of graph matching.

Although the thesis concentrates on three-dimensional shapes in computer vision,  Furqan’s new theory has the potential to be used to study the flow of information across networks, including finance and medicine.

The Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC), in conjunction with BCS and the BCS Academy of Computing, annually selects  the best British PhD/DPhil dissertations in computer science and publishes the winning dissertation and runner up submission online.

The prize winners received their awards at the prestigious BCS Roger Needham Lecture which took place at the Royal Society in London.

Furqan, who now works at the Institute of Management Sciences, Peshawar, Pakistan, said: “I remember my first meeting with my supervisors Edwin Hancock and Richard Wilson. Edwin showed me one of his previous PhD student’s thesis and said ‘this thesis has won a  BCS distinguished thesis award’.

“ I never thought at that time that my thesis would also get one of the distinguished dissertation awards. Thanks to BCS for the recognition. Thanks to my supervisors for the support and motivation that made it possible.”

 Simon Dobson, Chair of the Distinguished Dissertation Award panel, praised his entry.

He said: "Graph matching is vitally important for computer vision applications, but it also has huge potential impact in any domain that uses graph data structures.

“The review panel found that Furqan's thesis stood out from what was a very strong field of submissions, and richly deserved its 'highly commended' award."

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