PhD Scholarships

In Brief

• Topic: Computer Science and Communication Systems
• Closing Date: 20 May 2016
• Eligability: UK, EU, Overseas
• Contact: scc-phd-enquiries@lancaster.ac.uk 

Details

The School of Computing and Communications has a number of Doctoral Scholarships available for exceptional UK, EU and overseas graduates.

The Scholarships provide support for PhD studies for a duration of 3 to 3.5 years and include a waiver of tuition fees (partial fee waiver for overseas students), a student maintenance grant (starting £14,000 per year tax free, with annual increments) and a training bursary of £800 per year (e.g. for attending summer schools).

Awards will be made on the basis of academic excellence and potential for future achievement as demonstrated by your application and supporting references. In addition, you should consider how the research area you propose is aligned with the research interests of any of our academic staff in the School. Our research pages offer an overview of the areas covered by the School, as well as the specific research interests of indivdual staff and should help you in applying. You are encouraged to informally contact individual staff to discuss your specific interests, or to seek general advice from the PhD Admissions Tutor, Dr Gerald Kotonya, on research areas covered in the School. If you are shortlisted, you will be contacted within a week of the application deadline.

We are immensely proud of our postgraduate research community in the School, and of the internationally significant reputation they help us achieve. You will be encouraged to participate fully, targeting and presenting your work at international conferences, and you will have excellent opportunities to collaborate nationally and internationally through our academic partnerships and links with industry.

How to Apply

Please apply online via Lancaster University Postgraduate Admissions Portal. 

Further information on how to apply for a PhD in the School can be found here, and guidance on writing your Research Proposal is also available here.

In Brief

• Topic: Digital Technology and Environmental Change
• Closing Date: 20 May 2016
• Eligability: UK and EU
• Contact: Potential candidates are strongly encouraged to contact Professor Gordon Blair (tel: 01524 510303) to discuss potential PhD topics and to learn more about this research initiative and this associated opportunity

Details

Lancaster University has recently received a substantial 5-year research grant (in the form of a Senior Fellowship) of around £2.5m, jointly funded from the Digital Economy (DE) and Living with Environmental Change (LWEC) programmes. This will fund a cross-disciplinary research programme investigating the role of digital technology in understanding, mitigating and adapting to environmental change. The research focuses specifically on three complementary areas of digital technology, namely the Internet of Things, cloud computing and data science, all areas with the potential to transform our understanding of the natural environment.

As part of our commitment to this programme of research, the university is funding a 3.5 year PhD studentship in an associated area to be hosted in the School of Computing and Communications. The studentship covers an annual tax-free stipend of £14,057 (with annual increments), tuition fees at home/EU level (currently £4052) and access to a training grant (£800 p.a.).

We are looking for a strongly motivated an ambitious PhD student to join and support this initiative. Potential areas include, but are not limited to:

• The role of Internet of Things technology in providing real-time streamed data associated with the natural environment;
• The role of cloud computing in supporting a new kind of open, integrative and collaborative science;
• The role of cloud computing for the execution of complex environmental models;
• The role of data science in making sense of complex and heterogeneous environmental data;
• The management of the underlying complexity of distributed systems, including middleware principles and techniques to raise the level of abstraction of underlying technological infrastructure;
• Management of complexity in environmental ecosystems, including insights from systems of systems thinking;
• Reasoning about uncertainty, including support for decision making in an uncertain world;
• Issues of privacy and/ or security around environmental data;
• Human and/or societal issues around digital technology and living with environmental change

We are also open to cross-disciplinary research pertinent to this area.

How to Apply

Please apply online via Lancaster University Postgraduate Admissions Portal. Once you have created an account you will be able to fill in your personal details, background and upload supporting documentation.

For the research proposal, please submit a statement of around 1,000 words that covers: i) why you would like to join this initiative, ii) what specifically you would like to do (including potential research questions), and iii) why this is important, novel and timely.

 

In Brief

• Topic: Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities: A Deep Map of the Lake District
  
• Closing Date: 31 May 2016
• Eligibility: UK, EU, Overseas
• Academic Requirements: You must have an excellent degree in Computer Science, or closely related field. Experience of an MSc project in NLP, HCI, or any related area is desirable but not a requirement.
• Funding: The Scholarship provides tuition fees (or partial fee waiver for overseas students) for a duration of 3 years; an annual stipend of £14,000.
• Contact: Potential applicants should email to Paul Rayson or Ian Gregory for informal advice.

Details

You are invited to apply for a PhD studentship, funded for up to 3 years, commencing October 2016 (or sooner if possible). The studentship is linked to a Leverhulme Trust project which started in 2015 called “Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities: A Deep Map of the Lake District” awarded to Dr Paul Rayson (School of Computing and Communications), Professor Ian Gregory (History), Professor Sally Bushell (English and Creative Writing) and Dr Christopher Donaldson (English Literature, University of Birmingham).

Overall, the Leverhulme Trust project is developing new understandings of the literary and cultural geographies of one of Britain’s most significant cultural landscapes, the English Lake District, by applying ground-breaking, exploratory geographical methods to the interdisciplinary research field of the spatial humanities. Bringing together researchers with complementary expertise in computer science, geographic information science (GISc), literary studies, and regional history, the project will create a step change in the way scholars engage with the geographies that inform regional identity and sense of place.

If your application is successful, you will join the UCREL research centre and based within the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, and be co-supervised by Dr Paul Rayson and Professor Ian Gregory.  You will work within a long standing interdisciplinary team linking corpus-based natural language processing research with the spatial humanities.

The core of the PhD will be to develop a prototype deep map (envisaged as an intuitive, open-access web tool) that allows a range of user-groups to gain new understandings of the importance of space and place to Lake District heritage. Its core source will be the Corpus of Lake District writing – over 1.5 million words from texts written between 1622-1900 from which place-names have been extracted and geo-located. Deep mapping offers a new way to approach, understand and analyse the relationship between geography, history and literature through a variety of media that allows for full exploration of multiple layers of meaning in relation to the object of study

The first question the thesis will explore is what new research processes are supported by the affordances of interactive deep map methods that combine spatial analysis, natural language processing (NLP) and corpus linguistics techniques? Second, how does one present this information to a wide range of user-groups in ways that make it accessible and understandable? Third, which interactive visualisation techniques best support these different user-groups? The user-groups in question include in particular: (1) scholars of literature, history, human geography and other subjects with an interest in the Lake District; (2) students studying these subjects; (3) the wider public including tourists and the local community and particularly organisations that serve these groups including museums and galleries, local heritage societies, the National Park Authority and Tourist Information Centres. We have good links to these organisations through Lancaster’s Regional Heritage Centre.

How to Apply

Please apply online via Lancaster University Postgraduate Admissions Portal. 

Further information on how to apply for a PhD in the School can be found here, and guidance on writing your Research Proposal is also available here.

 

 

 

In Brief

• Topic: Funded industry-focused PhDs with £15,000 stipend for graduates from computing, communications and related disciplines
• Closing Date: June 2016 for 2016 entry, applications open for 2017
• Eligibility: UK, EU, Overseas (some fees still apply)
• Contact: scitech.partnerships@lancaster.ac.uk

Details

Lancaster University is seeking graduates with a background in communications, computing, engineering, environmental sciences, geography, mathematics, physics or related disciplines, for three-year industry focussed PhDs. Starting in October 2016 you could be part of a new cohort of around 40 exceptional PhD researchers working in a unique partnership between academia and business.

You will be working with a leading high-growth business undertaking intensive R&D on a specific research project to underpin the development of a new product or service, using this work as the basis of your PhD programme of study. Your postgraduate tuition fees will be paid for by your partner business, worth over £12,000 (UK/EU graduates only, fees for Non EU/UK graduates are subsidised from  £16,500/year to £12,500/year). You can also register interest now in joining our second cohort of around 40 PhDs starting in 2017.

Further information can be found here.