De Montfort University PhD Scholarships

Project description

Applications are invited for a full PhD Scholarship in resilient water infrastructure, including developing an innovative design and operational scheme for resilient water supply from water distribution systems. The PhD stipend is £55,866 (£18,622 per annum) towards living expenses.

You will be a conscientious, innovative researcher who has a strong background in engineering and/or computer science with strong skills in programming and modelling and analysis. Experience in data analysis for complex systems is preferred.

You will be based in the internationally acknowledged Water Software System (WSS) group, and co-supervised by Dr Kegong Diao and Dr Fuad Khoshnaw who will provide training in both water engineering and mechanical engineering and the combination of those skills for developing sustainable infrastructure systems. The successful candidate will also have opportunity to collaborate with stakeholders in partnership with the research group.

Funding

DMU is offering a fully-funded 3-year PhD scholarship for this work, commencing on 1^st January 2024. Tuition fees at Home level will be waived (international students will need to pay the difference between Home and International fees which is around £10k per year). The studentship comes with a stipend pegged at the UKRI rate, currently at £18,622 per annum.  The supervisory team consists of Dr Kegong Diao (Kegong.diao@dmu.ac.uk) and Dr Fuad Khoshnaw (fuad.khoshnaw@dmu.ac.uk).

Applicants must:

• Possess a UK Honours degree with at least an upper second class (or overseas equivalent), a Masters Degree or an academic or professional qualification plus experience in their sector or industry.
• Demonstrate competence in the use of the English language. Please see section 5b here for further details on meeting our English language entry criteria.

Project description

The recent progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), has made it possible to develop autonomous agents that can perform a variety of tasks that were not possible to achieve in the past. In this project, you will develop AI algorithms to automate the penetration testing process for mission-critical Cyber Physical Systems. These systems include, but are not limited to, railway systems, aircrafts, autonomous vehicles, power systems, and process control systems. Such systems are characterised by the fact that their failure may result in human, environmental, as well as financial losses. Research activities will include building models to represent partial attacker knowledge about the system, developing AI planning and decision-making algorithms to achieve given attack goals, and analytical as well as experimental validation of the developed algorithms. Experimental validation will be performed in collaboration with Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), USA. This is cross-disciplinary research, spanning the domains of Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Physical Systems, and Cyber Security. The candidate is required to have a strong background in AI, particularly Reinforcement Learning. In addition, the candidate is required to possess skills in at least one of the following domains:

• Cyber physical systems: design, modelling, and simulation.
• Cyber security: vulnerabilities, attack modelling, and penetration testing.

Funding

DMU is offering a fully-funded 3-year PhD scholarship for this work, commencing on 1^st January 2024. Tuition fees at Home level will be waived (international students will need to pay the difference between Home and International fees which is around £10k per year). The studentship comes with a stipend pegged at the UKRI rate, currently at £18,622 per annum. The supervisory team consists of Dr Ashraf Tantavy (ashraf.tantavy@dmu.ac.uk) and Dr Richard Smith (rgs@dmu.ac.uk).

Applicants must:

• Possess a UK Honours degree with at least an upper second class (or overseas equivalent), a Masters Degree or an academic or professional qualification plus experience in their sector or industry.
• Demonstrate competence in the use of the English language. Please see section 5b here for further details on meeting our English language entry criteria.

Project description

While climate change has pushed the agenda for improving the energy performance of domestic building stock globally, the animal houses in farms still have high heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting demands to control their indoor climate. Although the exact design of facilities vary, depending on intended use, typical small animal housing has passive ventilation i.e. free ventilation where the airflow is not controlled directly, resulting in unacceptable levels of heat loss.

This generously funded project (with additional support from Jenton International Ltd, subject to contract) will endeavour to develop an air cleaning/warming apparatus, custom-designed for animal housing typical in the UK, in order to improve their operational efficiency and reduce energy demand. The research will explore innovative nature-inspired control techniques derived from evidence from literature (e.g., how animals regulate their body temperature or how they work together to accomplish tasks, etc.) to devise a more efficient and effective automated cleaning and warming system in animal houses.

Funding

DMU is offering a fully-funded 3-year PhD scholarship for this work, commencing on 1^st January 2024. Tuition fees at Home level will be waived (international students will need to pay the difference between Home and International fees which is around £10k per year). The studentship comes with a stipend pegged at the UKRI rate, currently at £18,622 per annum. The supervisory team consists of Dr Abhishek Tiwary (abhishek.tiwary@dmu.ac.uk) and Dr Sanober Khattak (sanober.khattak@dmu.ac.uk).

Applicants must:

• Possess a UK Honours degree with at least an upper second class (or overseas equivalent), a Masters Degree or an academic or professional qualification plus experience in their sector or industry.
• Demonstrate competence in the use of the English language. Please see section 5b here for further details on meeting our English language entry criteria.

Project description

The continuous development of the semiconductor industry to meet the increasing demand of modern electronic devices which enhance computing capabilities is attributed to the exploration of simple, high-speed operation and multistate information storage capacity two terminal memory called memristor. Despite all these advantages, one of the main challenges industry faces that is holding back their use in commercial applications is operational variability.

In the light of recent advances in functional graphene-based materials, this project puts forward the use of graphene and its derivative as a novel and exciting alternative to previously trialled materials. The PhD candidate will focus on the fabrication and characterization of memory devices based on GBMs, along with an exploration of the potential of GBMs solid-state cells to mimic the functionality of biological neuronal networks. Additionally, the student will have the opportunity to interact with our network partners working on the Royal Society International Exchanges Project.

DMU is offering a fully-funded 3-year PhD scholarship for this work, commencing on 1^st January 2024. Tuition fees at Home level will be waived (international students will need to pay the difference between Home and International fees which is around £10k per year). The studentship comes with a stipend pegged at the UKRI rate, currently at £18,622 per annum. The supervisory team consists of Dr Iulia Salaoru (iulia.salaoru@dmu.ac.uk) and Dr Krishna Nama Manjunatha (Krishna.namamanjunatha@dmu.ac.uk).

Applicants must:

• Possess a UK Honours degree with at least an upper second class (or overseas equivalent), a Masters Degree or an academic or professional qualification plus experience in Materials, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering or a related discipline. Demonstrate competence in the use of the English language. Please see section 5b here for further details on meeting our English language entry criteria.

Project description

The project aims to research and develop novel techniques which enable change-adaptive machine learning models to remain transparent and interpretable when performing data stream analysis. Data streams are high velocity, potentially unbounded streams of data and it is expected that the concepts within the data are subject to change over time. Semi-supervised and self-supervised change-adaptive models which continue to learn in these streams are vulnerable to a loss of interpretability and transparency over time. The project aims to research and develop novel techniques for transparent change-adaptation and a framework for maintaining this transparency for data stream analysis.

Funding

DMU is offering a fully-funded 3-year PhD scholarship for this work, commencing on 1^st January 2024. Tuition fees at Home level will be waived (international students will need to pay the difference between Home and International fees which is around £10k per year). The studentship comes with a stipend pegged at the UKRI rate, currently at £18,622 per annum.

The supervisory team consists of Dr Conor Fahy (conor.fahy@dmu.ac.uk) and Professor Shengxiang Yang (syang@dmu.ac.uk). Potential applicants can contact Dr Fahy or Professor Yang if they have any questions about the project.

Applicants must:

• Possess a UK Honours degree with at least an upper second class, or overseas equivalent degree, and a Masters Degree or an academic or professional qualification plus experience in their sector or industry.
• Demonstrate competence in the use of the English language. Please see section 5b here for further details on meeting our English language entry criteria.