Between 7 and 11 April 2025, the School of Computer Science was proud to host the 25th edition of the Midlands Graduate School in the Foundations of Computing Science (MSG 25) alongside the Foundations of Computation (FoX) group here at the University of Sheffield. The MGS is a major yearly event in the international landscape of PhD schools in theoretical computer science, and a long-standing collaboration between the universities of Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham, and ourselves here at Sheffield.
MGS 25 welcomed 66 student participants and featured eight intensive courses on a variety of foundational topics (category theory, logic, proof theory, verification and quantum computing), both from international leaders and from rising-star academics, including the FoX members and the School of Computer Science's Charles Grellois and Chelsea Edmonds.
This year's event was organised by Andrei Popescu, Georg Struth, and Harsh Beohar, together with colleagues from the School of Computer Science, with the 25th edition being the fourth time the event has been hosted here at Sheffield. Together, we're providing a sustained and impactful contribution in training the next generation of theoretical computer scientists.
Each year, the MGS features one course by a prominent invited speaker, in addition to seven courses by lecturers from the MGS sites (many of which have been contributed by colleagues from Sheffield over the years). This year, the invited lecturer was David Pym from UCL, who gave an overview of proof-theoretic program semantics. Past invited lecturers include Samson Abramsky, Andrej Bauer, Kevin Buzzard, Thierry Coquand, Luke Ong, Andrew Pitts, Thomas Streicher, and Tarmo Uustalu.
The MGS is traditionally preceded by an MGS Christmas seminar. This year's audience enjoyed talks from Nicolas Wu, Sergey Goncharov, and Maksim Zhukovskii from the FoX group.
This year, the MGS has benefited from the generous support of Amazon, Huawei and VeTSS, the UK's national Research Centre on Verified Trustworthy Software Systems, and has hosted a number of participants from industry as well.
Georg Struth, the head of the FoX group, who has been director of MGS between 2007 and 2024 and has lectured at the MGS for many years, said: "The MGS is among a handful of PhD schools in theoretical computer science with a global reach. Many of the students we have taught over the years have become academics at universities across the world. It is a great privilege that the FoX group at Sheffield can be a part of that."