FULLY FUNDED PHD STUDENTSHIP in meta-heuristic optimisation and machine learning in the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~xin/PhDAdvert.html

A fully-funded PhD studentship is available at CERCIA (the Centre of Excellence for Research in Computational Intelligence and Applications), School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK. The successful candidate will work in the areas of nonlinear optimisation, especially meta-heuristic optimisation (evolutionary optimisation), and machine learning. In particular, the PhD project will study novel learning algorithms for enhancing meta-heuristic optimisation algorithms. The key research issues include the conservation, abstraction and modelling of experience gained from optimising one problem instance and the smart integration of such experience/knowledge in solving related problem instances. The main research challenges include: the representation of experience; the mapping/transfer of the problem-solving experience across problem instances; the incorporation of transferred experience into solving the current problem instance at hand.

We are looking for candidates who have an excellent MSc or BSc/BEng degree in computer science or a closely related area. We offer the successful candidate the opportunity to work both within the academic environment (University of Birmingham) and in an industrial setting (Honda Research Institute Europe), providing an excellent training for future careers in either academia or industry.

FUNDING:

The PhD studentship is for three-years, covering all tuition fees and GBP14,777 per year tax-free living stipends. Additional funding is available for conference travels.

RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT:

CERCIA at the School of Computer Science, the University of Birmingham, has a long tradition of supporting outstanding PhD students in natural computation (especially evolutionary computation). Our former PhD students won prestigious IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Outstanding PhD Dissertation Awards (twice), CPHC/BCS Distinguished Dissertation Award (Runner-up), and highly competitive Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, EPSRC Theoretical Computer Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, etc.

DEADLINE: 30 April 2018.

HOW TO APPLY:

For further details of how to apply, please visit http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/admissions/postgraduate-research/ and follow the instructions and links there.

FURTHER INFORMATION: Contact Prof. Xin Yao, x.yao@cs.bham.ac.uk.