Funding Awards for Doctoral Training

The University has won a share of a £350 million investment in UK science and engineering postgraduate training.

PhD students will be supported by funding announced by David Willetts, the Universities and Science Minister.

This investment, from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, will fund more than 70 Centres for Doctoral Training across 24 UK universities, several of which will be at hosted at Edinburgh.

The School of Informatics will host the Centre for Data Science and Pervasive Parallelism along with the Centre for Robotics and Autonomous Systems in collaboration with Heriot Watt University.

Data Science

Edinburgh will host the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Data Science, led by Professor Chris Williams in the School of Informatics.

This focuses on the computational principles, methods, and systems for extracting knowledge from data.

Large data sets are now generated by almost every activity in science, society, and commerce, ranging from molecular biology to social media, from sustainable energy to health care.

Data science seeks to efficiently find patterns in these vast streams of information.

Pervasive Parallelism

The CDT in Pervasive Parallelism will be led by Professor Mike O'Boyle in the School of Informatics.

It seeks to address the end of the one-step-at-time era of sequential computing.

Students will focus on systems containing multiple processors.

Their research will reconsider how to design programming languages and architectures, for example to allow flexible trading of energy for performance.

Researchers will consider the necessary theories and methodologies to reason about the behaviour of this new hardware and software.

Industrial interaction will ensure students engage with real world case-studies.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems

The CDT in Robotics and Autonomous Systems will be led at Edinburgh by Professor Sethu Vijayakumar, in partnership with Heriot-Watt University.

It will address key challenges for managing interactions between robots and their environments, between multiple autonomous systems, and between robots and people.

The centre will use industrial engagement to ground research and training on real world challenges, enabling an innovation pipeline from research to global markets.

This will be supported by Edinburgh’s world class infrastructure in robotics.