Four studentships

Applications are invited from suitably qualified graduates for four fully funded PhD studentships based within the School of Computer Science and the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute at The University of Nottingham.

We are happy to consider any topic that reasonably falls under the heading of computer systems, distributed systems, and networking, but we are particularly interested in topics that intersect with existing research projects within Horizon and CREATe including privacy, ownership of and access to digital material; copyright-respecting data mining; and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) at home and at work. Existing approaches within NSG exploit in-the-wild deployment and experimentation, design of federated and distributed systems, use of mobile code, and privacy by design. Topics of particular interest include:

• How can we create open, federated platforms that avoid “walled gardens” but still support a range of business models, for applications such as social networks?
• How can existing business models based around technologies such as search be efficiently supported while respecting copyright and other intellectual property rights?
• How can we build technical alternatives to existing data mining techniques that are compatible with the Hargreaves’ reforms suggestion of a data mining exception to copyright?
• How can we best meet the security requirements and capabilities for widely deployed, relatively underpowered sensors managed by non-expert users?
• How can the storage required for large-scale IoT deployments best be provided and managed?
• How can features of collected data be exploited to provide compression, efficient querying, and guarantees for audit/regulatory purposes?
• How can privacy concerns, inherent in large-scale collection of data from objects and buildings, be addressed from a technical perspective?
• How can we design and build IoT technologies that are amenable to deployment in domestic contexts, including notions such as the Intranet-of-Things?

Due to the nature of funding the studentships are for home/EU students. The PhD scholarships are offered for the duration of three years, starting in October 2013, and will cover full University fees plus a stipend of £13,590 per year.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to Dr Richard Mortier of the School of Computer Science and the Horizon Institute, email: richard.mortier@nottingham.ac.uk. Please note that applications to this email address will not be accepted.

Further details may be found at:

CREATe Centre – www.create.ac.uk/

Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute – www.horizon.ac.uk,

School of Computer Science at The University of Nottingham – www.nottingham.ac.uk/cs.

https://my.nottingham.ac.uk/pgapps/welcome

To apply, please click on the ‘Apply’ button below.

Applicants should include a personal statement detailing how their education, previous experience and research interests would help them to address the challenges of the CREATe project (described above) or other related Horizon project. Please quote ref. SCI/1306.

Closing date: 16 August 2013.