Steve Lakin

Demonstrator in Computer Science Department of Computer Science, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH. office: CW303 (Charles Wilson Building) tel: +44 (0)116 223 1371 fax: +44 (0)116 252 3604 e-mail: srl10@mcs.le.ac.uk

• Current position: Demonstrator in Computer Science
• Research Status: Recently completed a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science, entitled Context-sensitive decision problems in groups.

Teaching

This semester I am involved in the following modules :

• CO1098 Information Management and CO1099 Information Technology.
• CO2008 Functional Programming
• CO2011 Automata, Languages and Computation

Innocence

Research

The basis of my thesis was an interaction between the three fields of group theory, formal language theory, and complexity theory. My PhD was entitled Context-sensitive decision problems in groups. Here, I investigated various properties of groups with a context-sensitive decision problem. Amongst my results, it was proved that there exists a group with context-sensitive conjugacy problem, which is a subgroup of index 2 of a group with unsolvable conjugacy problem. It was also shown that is possible to embed many languages as the word problem of a group. This technique was then used to show that there exists a subgroup of an automatic group which does not have context-sensitive word problem. My thesis was published in the University of Leicester Technical Report series, number 2002/42. Further papers are in progress.