DAASE PhD Student Bursary Offered in Search Based Software Engineering and Program Verification University College London is offering a fully funded student bursary in Search Based Software Engineering and Program Verification to start September 2013. The funding provides fees and living support for a full four years, subject to standard EPSRC terms and rates, and will be awarded to the student who meets the UCL admissions criteria for the UCL Department of Computer Science PhD programme and who best suits the project, set out below. The Search Based Software Engineering and Program Verification Project You Will Undertake for Your PhD Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) concerns the application of computational search to solve demanding software engineering problems, typified by large search spaces and multiple competing and conflicting optimisation objectives. This project seeks to exploit recent developments in search based test data generation and genetic programming for bug fixing. It will develop novel techniques for automating the regression testing of bug fixing and will further seek to develop and adapt program verification for search based bug fixing. The overall goal will be to combine verification with search based testing and bug fixing to provide an end-to-end approach to find, fix and verify software. The Supervisors/Advisors Who Will Guide You The student will be supervised by Professor Mark Harman (who will be the first supervisor) and Professor Peter O'Hearn (second supervisor), with Professor Westley Weimer acting as an external advisor to the programme. These advisors are world leading experts in Search Based Software Engineering, Verification and Automated Bug Fixing. Professor Harman is also the overall director of the DAASE programme grant. The DAASE Project for Which You Will Be a Full Member The Dynamic Automated Adaptive Software Engineering (DAASE) project is a large programme grant, funded by EPSRC and led by UCL. More details on the project are available at http://daase.cs.ucl.ac.uk/. This bursary is funded by the DAASE programme grant. The applicant to whom the award is made will be a full member of the DAASE project. In addition to the student's bursary, the project will also provide support for the student's travel to conferences and meetings to support their work on the project and their career development as a researcher. What the Studentship Bursary Will Cover in Terms of Fees and Living Expenses: The bursary covers fees and a tax free stipend to support living costs. The rates are those standard rates applicable for studentships and are calculated to be sufficient to support all costs of living and those required to undertake the work. The fees component paid is normally that for home/EU student fees only (currently ￡4,410). The stipend is a tax free lump sum of ￡15,590. Therefore the total value of the bursary is ￡80,000 spread over four years. In addition research related expenses for equipment and conference travel will also be covered to support your work. The overall Research Environment within Which You Will Work at UCL: The student to whom this studentship bursary is awarded will be situated in the CREST centre, which is part of the Software Systems, Engineering group (SSE) within the Department of Computer Science at UCL. The CREST centre at UCL builds on the three foundations of Program Dependence, Information Theory and Optimisation Algorithms. On these three foundations are developed ways to analyse, understand and improve software, with applications throughout the spectrum of software development activities. The centre is also active in digital humanities and music computing, tackling problems in interactive performance and music analysis. The centre recently received a platform grant (￡1.2m, 2009-2014) as well as the DAASE programme (￡6.7m, 2012-2018) from the EPSRC and has other current funding from other funders such as the EU, AHRC and Royal Society as well as cash gifts from HP, Google and Motorola. CREST also hosts a series of monthly workshops, the CREST Open Workshop Programme (the COWs). As of December 2012, there have been a total of 780 registrations from 400 different attendees, who came to CREST from 174 institutions spread over 37 countries and listed to 241 research talks. As the CREST website shows, these workshops have hosted presentations from some of the world’s leading scientists and software engineers from both industry and academia. Talks are video recorded and archived along with slides and other resources on the CREST website at http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/ CREST is part of the Software Systems Engineering at UCL, one of the world’s leading Software Engineering groups. The group has three former ICSE chairs and two ISSTA chairs and membership of many editorial boards and programme committees. Its staff have given keynotes at leading international conferences such as ASE, ESEM, RE and ETAPS. Its work is also highly cited and used by ABB, Daimler, Ericsson, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft and Motorola. UCL itself was founded in 1826 and was one of the two founding colleges of the University of London in 1836. UCL is the 13th most cited University in the world (based on data from 1999 to 2009) and the most cited in Europe. Its current and former staff include 26 Nobel Prize winners and 3 winners of the fields medal. It is consistently ranked in the top twenty universities in the world according to a wide variety of university ranking systems (and as high as fourth place in some). The Application Procedure You Should Follow: Applicants for the award of the studentship should first apply for a place on the UCL Computer Science Department PhD student programme, by applying in the normal way (details are available on the UCL CS website, http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/admissions/phd_programme/applying/ . You should be sure to mark clearly on your application that you want to be considered for the DAASE Project Bursary and that you wish to be supervised by Professor Harman. This will ensure that your application is processed correctly. If you have any queries about submitting an application, please email Melanie Johnson, melanie.johnson@ucl.ac.uk. Having applied through the UCL CS department system, please also notify Professor Harman and Lena Hierl, his personal assistant, of your application via email (Mark.Harman@ucl.ac.uk and crest-admin@cs.ucl.ac.uk). There is no need to take any further action. Your application will be considered by the department for admission to the PhD programme. The successful applicant will have or be about to obtain university level qualification which involves the study of at least one topic relevant to the project (e.g. optimisation, evolutionary computation, testing, verification etc.). Evidence of aptitude for research will be the primary criterion in deciding to whom the bursary will be awarded for those applicants who meet the eligibility requirements. Your application must reach the department before March 31st 2013. You may be called for an interview and should keep free 16th April 2013 for this.