| Applications are invited for a PhD studentship to work on a project
based in the Computing Technologies Centre (a recent 1.5 million
pounds, purpose-designed SRIF-funded research centre) in the School of
Computing at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. The project will
be an integral part of a wider research effort on Machine Learning,
which includes the on-going EPSRC "Efficient Biological Grammar
Acquisition" project (£110K), and will have the support of the
Computational Intelligence research group (see
http://www.comp.rgu.ac.uk/research/cig).
Linguistic methods have provided some interesting results in
computational biology. However the hand development of grammars is
difficult and, because it requires human expertise, expensive. Thus,
given the enormous volume of data arising from genome projects, there
is a need to automate the acquisition of grammars. We aim to satisfy
this need by developing novel Computer Science methods for biological
grammar acquisition. These methods belong to a branch of Computer
Science known as Machine Learning/Data Mining and, more specifically,
the research field entitled Inductive Logic Programming (ILP). When
ILP systems learn, they evaluate the hypotheses that they form using a
data compression measure. Unfortunately the compression measures used
by the prevailing contemporary ILP systems are not well-suited to
biological grammar acquisition. This project aims to rectify this by
developing novel compression measures.
You should have at least a 2:1 Honours degree (or equivalent) in
Computing or a cognate discipline; or you may have a background in the
life sciences and have an advanced MSc in Computing or a cognate
discipline. You will be highly self-motivated and a good communicator
and programmer. Previous experience or knowledge of one or more of
the following would be an advantage: Machine Learning, Data Mining,
Logic Programming, Data Compression.
The studentship provides full university fees and a tax-free
maintenance allowance of £12,000 per annum. The studentship is
available to start from September 2005.
Informal enquiries to: Dr Chris Bryant Tel: +44 (0)1224 262747 URL:
http://www.comp.rgu.ac.uk/staff/chb
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| Applications including a completed application form (available from
http://www.rgu.ac.uk/research/degrees), a detailed CV, names and
addresses of two referees should be sent to Mr Martin Simpson
([email protected]), Research Support Office, The Robert Gordon
University, Schoolhill, Aberdeen AB10 1RF.
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