PhD Studentship/Scholarship

[John A Bullinaria]

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Preliminary Announcement of an Anticipated PhD Studentship/Scholarship
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The School of Computer Science, the University of Birmingham, UK,
anticipates (subject to final approval and exchange of contract) setting
up a highly competitive PhD Studentship/Scholarship in the Natural
Computation group to work on the project, "Automatic Problem Decomposition
Using Co-evolution and Ensembles", funded by Honda R&D Europe
(Deutschland) GmbH. The PhD Studentship/Scholarship is valued at
approximately 17,000 pounds to 20,000 pounds per annum (covering tuition
fees, maintenance costs, and travel to the Honda R&D Europe office in
Germany) for up to three years (subject to the satisfactory progress of
the postholder). In addition, conference travels to present accepted
papers may also be funded by Honda R&D Europe or the School of Computer
Science on a case by case basis.

We are looking for an outstanding candidate to take up this PhD
Studentship/Scholarship. The successful candidate must have a first class
honours or equivalent in computer science or a closely related field. If
your grades are not classified as in a British honours degree, you need to
show that you are within at least the top 3% of your year in your average
mark. If you have some work/research experience already, please send your
best paper with your application.

The successful candidate is expected to spend approximately 8 weeks each
year at Honda R&D Europe.

The School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham has a
strong research group in natural computation, with eight members of
academic staff (six faculty and two research fellows) currently
specialising in this field:

Dr. John Bullinaria (Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computation, Cog.Sci.)
Dr. Ke Chen (Neural Networks, Pattern Recognition, Machine Perception)
Dr. Aniko Ekart (Genetic Programming, AI, Machine Learning)
Dr. Jun He (Evolutionary Computation, Artificial Immune Systems)
Dr. Julian Miller (Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning)
Dr. Jon Rowe (Evolutionary Computation, AI)
Dr. Thorsten Schnier (Evolutionary Computation, Engineering Design)
Prof. Xin Yao (Evolutionary Computation, NNs, Nature Inspired Comp.)

Other staff members also working in these areas include Prof. Aaron Sloman
(evolvable architectures of mind, co-evolution, interacting niches), Dr.
Jeremy Wyatt (evolutionary robotics, classifier systems), and Dr Ela
Claridge (evolutionary image processing).

There are more than a dozen PhD students currently working in this field.

For further information on the technical issues related to this PhD
Studentship/Scholarship, please contact Prof. Xin Yao
(x.yao at cs.bham.ac.uk).

For application and anything else, please contact Dr Peter Hancox, the
Research Student Admissions Tutor (p.j.hancox at cs.bham.ac.uk).

More information about the PhD programme in the School of Computer Science
can be found at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-research/.

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