Deadline: 14 December 2012
Open to: students from the UK or European Union
Scholarship: fully funded 3 year PhD study
Description
Professors at the University of Edinburgh are recruiting for at least one funded PhD studentship in the University of Edinburgh, working with professors on the following topics:
- Provenance, curation, and archiving for scientific data – Provenance means metadata/trace information about a computation. Many scientific disciplines are increasingly data-driven and require support for provenance to make it possible to safely share and reuse raw data or processed results. Our recent focus has been on defining models of provenance that provide useful information for debugging, auditing or assurance or scientific results based on complex computations, and on implementing specific techniques addressing unmet needs for scientific data curation. PhD projects in this area could focus on either the foundations or implementation and evaluation of provenance techniques or on a combination of both. One specific project in this area is extending and evaluating a “database wiki” system for making it easier to collaborate on scientific data resources while fully tracking the provenance and change history of the data. Other projects, building on interests in the Database Group in data annotation, provenance, archiving, citation, and curation, or interests in the Data-Intensive Research Group in provenance for scientific workflows, are also possible.
- XML query/update languages and static analysis – The professor is interested in supervising work on XML databases and analyses to improve the reliability or efficiency of XQuery engines, including update processing. This could include developing more precise analyses for existing problems nre new analysis techniques, or applying efficient techniques for constraint solving, model checking or satisfiability modulo theories to solve subproblems based on XML/tree logics. I’m also interested in work on formalizing the semantics of such languages (which is required to verify static analyses and for other purposes).
This work would be suitable for a student with a solid grounding in programming languages or logic and an interest in implementation.
Projects in other areas related to data management, programming languages, or their intersection are also possible; prospective applicants are encouraged to contact James Cheney (jcheney@inf.ed.ac.uk), Stratis Viglas (sviglas@inf.ed.ac.uk), Peter Buneman (opb@inf.ed.ac.uk) to discuss potential project ideas.
Possible research topics with others in LFCS are listed at HERE along with contact information for prospective supervisors.
Eligibility
Available funding can cover full fees and a stipend for a 3-year PhD project for a student from the UK or EU. Additional studentships on similar terms may be available contingent on funding decisions. For students from other countries, the School provides assistance identifying and applying for appropriate sources of funding to cover additional applicable fees.
Some college eligibility requirements vary by country, so please consult the website HERE.
Application
To apply, please apply to the LFCS PhD program on THIS WEBSITE by 14 December 2012 to receive full consideration for available funding sources. There is no application fee
You will also need to follow the instructions at THIS WEBSITE. There is a Frequently Asked Questions page AVAILABLE HERE.
Please get in touch early in case of questions about the application process, project ideas or study in the UK or Edinburgh.
plz take him