PhD studentships in `Verifying requirements for resource-bounded agents'

School of Computer Science & IT
University of Nottingham, UK


Applications are invited for two PhD studentships in the School of Computer Science & IT at the University of Nottingham for research on verification of time, memory and communication bandwidth requirements of resource-bounded reasoners. The studentships are funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council as part of project number EP/E031226 and pay tuition fees for UK or EU students and living expenses (approximately 12,300 pounds pa) for a period of three years. The start date is the 2nd of April 2007, or as soon as possible thereafter, and the deadline for applications is the 15th of February 2007.

Brief project description

The aim of the project is to develop logics and computational models for reasoning about agents with limited memory which require time to derive new beliefs and have limited communication bandwidth when they communicate (resource-bounded agents). We are also going to develop a framework for automatically verifying the amount of memory, time, and exchanged information required for a set of reasoning agents to derive an answer for a given query.

A longer project description is available here.

People involved in the project

Investigators: Natasha Alechina and Brian Logan , University of Nottingham.

Visiting Fellows: Piergiorgio Bertoli , Chiara Ghidini and Luciano Serafini (ITC-irst, Trento).

PhD topics

The subjects of the two PhDs are related. PhD1 is more concerned with formal modelling of resource-bounded reasoners which reason using description logic, and PhD2 has more emphasis on developing the verification tool (based on MBP ). Both students will spend several months in Trento (PhD2 will spend a longer time, to benefit from the MBP expertise in Trento).

Information and applications

PhD candidates can apply for both or only one of the posts. Successful candidates should have a background in logic and/or planning.

Please address preliminary inquiries to Natasha Alechina (nza(at)cs.nott.ac.uk).

How to apply

Please apply on line at the University of Nottingham Postgraduate Admissions page . Please indicate on your application form that you are applying for the position on the project `Verifying requirements for resource-bounded agents' under supervision of Natasha Alechina and Brian Logan, and say whether you are interested in both PhD topics or only one of them.

Closing date: February 15, 2007.