Studentship

Fully funded PhD scholarship in Multi-agent Path Planning

Lead supervisor: Professor Ian Miguel

Application deadline: 1 March 2025

Project description:

Planning is a fundamental discipline of Artificial Intelligence, which asks us to find a sequence of actions transforming an initial state into a goal state. This project focuses on multi-agent path planning (also known as multi-agent path finding), where a set of mobile agents is navigated from starting positions to target positions. MAPP is the focus of intense research effort because it has many challenging real-world applications in robotics, navigation, the video game industry, and automatic warehousing. Automatic warehousing is one of the most challenging domains and the focus of the greatest investment. For example, Amazon have invested heavily in robot-equipped warehouses. It is performed on a huge scale (thousands of robots in warehouses containing many thousands of shelves and products) with the need to find an efficient solution quickly so that the robots are always safely moving towards their goals. The typical layout of a warehouse increases difficulty further: shelves are packed tightly into the space, reducing the capacity for movement of the robots.

MAPP is inherently very difficult — there is no known “cheap” method to produce high quality solutions quickly at the scale required. Current approaches fall into two categories, both relying on AI techniques that search through the vast space of possible solutions. Those that guarantee optimality struggle to scale, while approaches that scale do so at the cost of reduced solution quality. This proposal is to advance the state of the art in optimal MAPP significantly through a novel combination of path planning and constraint programming. Constraint programming is a powerful automated reasoning technique that allows us to model a complex decision-making problem such as MAPP by describing the set of choices that must be made (e.g. which path a robot should take) and the set of constraints that specify allowed combinations of choices (e.g. robots cannot collide). This model is presented to a constraint solver, which searches for solutions automatically, using powerful deduction mechanisms to reduce search considerably.

The project includes the following objectives:

A New Modelling Perspective: The model input to a constraint solver is crucial to the efficiency with which solutions can be found. Our proposed innovation is in how MAPP is modelled. We will exploit the many equivalencies in these problems, for example equivalent routes between locations, and equivalent resources in terms of the robots. While these remain in the model they must potentially all be explored, wasting enormous effort. Instead of modelling the warehouse layout at a fine level of detail, the current default leading to the consideration of a vast number of equivalent paths, we will abstract the fine-grained grid representation into larger regions, for example representing an entire corridor between two shelves.

Ensuring Validity: The research challenge in adopting this more abstract modelling perspective is to ensure that plans found with this reduced representation are valid in the real warehouse by, for example, constraining these regions so that their capacities are respected and the flow of traffic within them is such that collisions and deadlocks cannot occur.

Evaluation and refinement: We will evaluate our new model on benchmark problems drawn from the competitions where state of the art MAPP solvers compete. This will allow us to gauge progress and refine and improve our new approach.

The result of this research will be to improve the scalability of optimal solvers, producing better quality solutions, increasing the throughput of a warehouse, and reducing operational costs.

Eligibility Criteria

We are looking for highly motivated research students willing to be part of a diverse and supportive research community. Applicants must hold a good Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related area appropriate for their proposed topic of study.

International applications are welcome. We especially encourage female applicants and underrepresented minorities to apply. The School of Computer Science was awarded the Athena SWAN Silver award for its sustained progression in advancing equality and representation, and we welcome applications from those suitably qualified from all genders, all races, ethnicities and nationalities, LGBT+, all or no religion, all social class backgrounds, and all family structures to apply for our postgraduate research programmes.

Value of Award
  • Tuition scholarships cover PhD fees irrespective of country of origin.
  • Stipends are valued at £19,795 per annum (or the standard UKRI stipend, if it is higher).
To apply:

Interested applicants can contact Professor Ian Miguel with an outline proposal.

Full instructions for the formal application process can be found at How to apply – School of Computer Science – University of St Andrews

 

Fully funded PhD scholarship in software ethics

Supporting ethical deliberation in the software lifecycle

 

Lead supervisor: Dr Dharini Balasubramaniam

Application deadline: 1 March 2025

Project description:

Software ethics covers a broad spectrum of concerns including accountability, fairness, privacy and data protection, transparency, safety, security, accessibility, digital inclusion and sustainability. Much of the current dialogue on software ethics relates to the development, deployment and use of AI-based solutions, although there are ethical concerns related to most, if not all, software application domains. The pervasive nature of software, its critical importance to the functioning of many sectors, and the opaque nature of software-supported decision making in some domains all make it vital that ethical issues are explicitly considered throughout the software lifecycle.

There is generic ethics guidance, such as the ACM / IEEE Software Engineering Code of Ethics and sets of ethical principles specifically aimed at domains such as AI, available to software engineers. Generic and specific concepts such as value-based software development and responsible AI have been proposed to encourage ethical software development. However, there is still a lack of processes, notations, tools and training available to software professionals to support systematic ethical deliberation and ethics-driven development in practice.
This project will explore and attempt to address this gap. The student will design and develop ways to explicitly capture ethical requirements, risks and mitigations as first-class concepts in software artefacts. They will implement tools that work with these specifications to analyse the compliance of software artefacts with ethical requirements, and highlight potential violations and consequences. Interviews with software professionals and service providers may be used to inform and evaluate the efficacy and viability of outcomes. Open-source projects in chosen application domains may also be used for case study-based evaluation.

Topics of interest:

Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • A framework of ethical concerns that apply to software,
  • Notations to represent ethical requirements, risks and mitigations as first-class concepts in software design and implementation,
  • Tool support for the representation and analysis of ethical concerns in software artefacts,
  • Process and tool support for considering specific aspects of software ethics, such as bias avoidance, transparency, sustainability or accessibility, and
  • Integration of ethical training and deliberation within project and product management environments.

The scholarship:

We have one fully-funded scholarship available, starting in September 2025. The scholarship covers all tuition fees irrespective of country of origin and includes a stipend valued at £19,705 per annum. More details of the scholarship can be found here: https://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/csblog/2024/10/24/phd-studentships-available-for-2025-entry/, but please note the different application deadline.

Eligibility criteria:

We are looking for highly motivated research students keen to be part of a diverse and supportive research community. Applicants must hold a good Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related area appropriate for the topic of this PhD.

International applications are welcome. We especially encourage female applicants and underrepresented minorities to apply. The School of Computer Science was awarded the Athena SWAN Silver award for its sustained progression in advancing equality and representation, and we welcome applications from those suitably qualified from all genders, all races, ethnicities and nationalities, LGBT+, all or no religion, all social class backgrounds, and all family structures to apply for our postgraduate research programmes.

To apply:

Interested applicants can contact Dharini Balasubramaniam with an outline proposal. Full instructions for the formal application process can be found at https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/computer-science/prospective/pgr/how-to-apply/.

The deadline for applications is 1 March 2025.

Fully funded PhD Scholarship in Hardware Simulation at Scale

 

As the Internet ofThings (IoT) expands, the number of connected devices is expected to reach close to 30 billion by 2030. These devices range from simple sensors to complex embedded systems, each with unique characteristics and communication protocols. Simulating such a vast and diverse array of devices presents a significant challenge in terms of scalability, accuracy, and efficiency. This PhD project aims to develop a comprehensive framework for simulating many (1000s, 10,000s, 1,000,000s) heterogeneous IoT devices, at (hopefully) close to real-time speeds. The project will focus on designing a specialised languages for describing hardware and simulations, creating an efficient simulation environment, and exploring hardware acceleration techniques to achieve high performance and scalability.

Previous research in this area has primarily focused on simulating individual devices, smaller networks, or using simplified models that do not fully capture the intricacies of real-world IoT systems. This project seeks to address these limitations by developing a scalable simulation framework that can accurately model the behaviour of billions of heterogeneous devices, advancing the state-of-the-art in simulation languages, distributed computing, and hardware acceleration.

The project will be structured around three core research ideas:

  • Simulation Languages for Heterogeneous Embedded Devices: The first research objective is to explore the creation of a specialised language for describing the behaviour and interactions of heterogeneous IoT devices. This language will need to be expressive enough to capture the wide range of device architectures and communication protocols found in IoT systems. The language will also support modularity and extensibility, allowing users to easily incorporate new device types and behaviours into the simulation.
  • Development of a Scalable Simulation Environment: The second research objective is to create a simulation environment that can efficiently emulate IoT devices at scale, across multiple simulation servers. This environment will be designed to support distributed computing, allowing for parallel execution of simulated devices across a large number of servers. The project will explore various techniques for load balancing, synchronisation, and communication between servers to ensure that the simulation remains efficient and accurate as the scale increases.
  • Hardware Acceleration for Large-Scale Simulations: The third research objective is to investigate the use of hardware acceleration techniques, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), to improve the performance of large-scale IoT simulations. This aspect of the project will focus on identifying the components of the simulation that can be offloaded to specialised hardware, and developing algorithms and architectures that leverage this hardware to achieve significant performance gains.

Topics of Interest

  • Heterogeneous Systems Modelling: Techniques for accurately modelling the diverse architectures and communication protocols of IoT devices.
  • Distributed Simulation: Methods for efficiently distributing simulations across multiple servers, including load balancing, synchronisation, and inter-server communication.
  • Simulation Languages: Design and implementation of specialised languages for describing complex IoT devices and networks.
  • Hardware Acceleration: Exploration of FPGA, GPU, and other hardware acceleration technologies to enhance the performance of large-scale simulations.
  • Scalability and Performance Optimisation: Strategies for ensuring that the simulation framework can handle the increasing complexity and scale of IoT networks.
  • Validation and Verification: Techniques for validating and verifying the accuracy and reliability of large-scale IoT simulations.

The Scholarship

We have one fully-funded scholarship available, starting in September 2025, which will be awarded to competitively to the best applicant. The scholarship covers all tuition fees (irrespective of country of origin) and comes with a stipend valued at £19,705 per annum. More details can be found here: https://blogs.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/csblog/2024/10/24/phd-studentships-available-for-2025-entry/

International applications are welcome. We especially encourage female applicants and underrepresented minorities to apply. The School of Computer Science was awarded the Athena SWAN Silver award for its sustained progression in advancing equality and representation, and we welcome applications from those suitably qualified from all genders, all races, ethnicities and nationalities, LGBT+, all or no religion, all social class backgrounds, and all family structures to apply for our postgraduate research programmes.

To Apply

Informal enquiries can be directed to Tom Spink. Full instructions for formal applications can be found at https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/computer-science/prospective/pgr/how-to-apply/

The deadline for applications is 1 March 2025.

Fully-funded PhD scholarship in user experience design

Applications are sought from passionate, creative and outgoing students interested in using their skills and interests in tabletop gaming in application to research in computer science, Human Computer Interaction, and User Experience design. This exciting PhD project will see the worlds of TTRPG and computing coincide to produce meaningful interactions to support the design, development and deployment of technology, whether from the software level, or at the pipeline level in support of those who will become developers and designers.

Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPG) allow the player to immerse themselves in a world where anything can happen — within the rules. You can become someone new, fight demons, play out exciting and speculative storylines, all with the help of your party. This ability to place yourself in the life of another person (or ethereal being) resonates with principles of User Experience Design (UX) where usability experts strive to understand the impact their application or interface might have on a hypothetical audience. There is also the potential for this technique to be used in computer science education, to enable students to explore real world design and programming processes, and the ethical challenges that ensue with the creation of new software and hardware.

The difficulty in eliciting requirements from users, especially users with complex interaction needs, is well-established in literature (Ferreira et al., 2019; Heumader et al., 2018; Pacheco et al., 2018). The process is one that is primarily an ongoing act of interpretation in which user ‘wants’ are translated from interviews, observation, focus groups and such into actionable ‘needs’ that can then be addressed in further design and development. The literature thus makes a distinction between ‘gathering’ requirements – as in collecting together feedback – versus ‘eliciting’ requirements, which is a a more participatory form of ongoing interpretation. As noted by Pacheco et al. the process is highly contextual and its complexities are influenced by everything from the project, the organisation, the environment, and the prior-experiences and skill-sets of all involved parties. It is also dependent on the requirements elicitation techniques employed.
Continue reading

Fully-funded PhD scholarship in Privacy and Trust on the Web

As part of their efforts to enhance privacy and trust on the Web, many applications need to be able to determine whether or not a relationship exists between different entities. For example, it is desirable for web browsers to be able to determine that two domain names are under the same administrative control, such that cookies and other data can be safely shared between them. While determining these relationships might be easy for humans, it is impossible to do so algorithmically.

This project will explore approaches to the defining and enforcing organisational boundaries on the Internet. These approaches will consider the technical challenges, balancing those with user behaviour and expectations, and regulatory considerations. This will include identifying use cases, evaluating and measuring existing and proposed approaches, and developing and implementing novel techniques. Where appropriate, this will involve engagement with standards development organisations, including the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Continue reading

International PhD Studentships in Next Generation Distributed Systems

The School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews hosts the Edge Computing Hub. The Hub conducts world-class research for addressing systems-oriented challenges in edge computing and at its intersection with machine learning. Multiple studentships are available for exceptional PhD applicants to join our team and shape the activities of the Hub.

Eligibility Criteria

Applications from aspiring leaders of any nationality who have or shortly expect to obtain a first-class undergraduate (including integrated Masters) degree or MSc distinction (or international equivalent) in computer science or engineering are encouraged. Enthusiasm for research in distributed systems or at its interface with machine learning, an ability to think and work independently, excellent programming and analytical skills, and strong verbal and written communication skills are essential.

Applications must include

  • A CV that includes information on education and employment to date, projects developed or contributed to (any links to software repositories), technical and non-technical skills, any publications/presentations, and any other relevant items.
  • A Research Proposal of no longer than two sides of an A4 paper that includes a potential title, objectives, methodology, expected output (software/publication plans), your experience in the proposed area, and ways you will contribute to the Edge Computing Hub. A generic proposal will be considered ineligible.
  • Two signed academic references.
  • Academic transcripts and degree certificates.

How to apply

The above documents and applications must be submitted via the University of St Andrew’s Postgraduate Research Application Portal

Also, refer to the information on English language requirements.

Contact

Informal enquiries can be made to Dr Blesson Varghese ().

More about the supervisor can be found at https://www.blessonv.com.

World-Leading PhD Scholarship in Health Informatics

A fully-funded PhD scholarship is available to support an exceptional student wishing to undertake doctoral research in health informatics, in particular looking at analysing and predicting disease trajectories of multimorbidity. This prestigious PhD scholarship is awarded by St Leonard’s Postgraduate College at the University of St Andrews and will be supervised by Dr Areti Manataki, Dr Katherine Keenan, Prof Colin McCowan and Dr Michail Papathomas. Applications must be received by 12 June 2023.

Further information, including how to apply, can be found at: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/study/fees-and-funding/scholarships/scholarships-catalogue/postgraduate-scholarships/world-leading-scholarship-04-computer-science-medicine-geography/

World-Leading PhD Scholarship: Personalised, Adaptive, Language-based Planner for next generation Robotics

A fully-funded PhD scholarship in Computer Science is available for a strong and motivated student wishing to work at the intersection of vision, large-language models, and robotic planning. This prestigious PhD scholarship is awarded by St Leonard’s Postgraduate College at the University of St Andrews and will be supervised by Dr Juan Ye, Dr Alice Toniolo, and Dr Kasim Terzic.

For more information, including how to apply, please see the advert: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/study/fees-and-funding/scholarships/scholarships-catalogue/postgraduate-scholarships/world-leading-scholarship-01-computer-science/?

The Melville Trust for the Care and Cure of Cancer PhD award

The Melville Trust for the Care and Cure of Cancer have funded a PGR Studentship relative to the project entitled ‘Detecting high-risk smokers in Primary Care Electronic Health Records: An automatic classification, data extraction and predictive modelling approach’.

The supervisors are Prof. Frank Sullivan of the School of Medicine and Prof. Tom Kelsey of the School of Computer Science, with work commencing in September 2019. The award is for £83,875.

Interdisciplinary PhD studentship available with Management

Dr Tristan Henderson has a St Leonards interdisciplinary PhD studentship available, to be co-supervised by Professor Kirstie Ball of the School of Management. The area of study is to do with ethical values and data science. The student will be part of CRISP (Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance & Privacy), a collaborative research centre involving St Andrews, Edinburgh and Stirling. As an interdisciplinary project, we welcome and will consider applications from students with a wide variety of backgrounds, from computer science to management to technology law and anything in between. More details can be found on the CRISP website.