PhD Studentship: Automated Verification through Coalgebras ********************************************************************** University of Southampton - Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering Qualification type: PhD Location: Southampton, UK Funding for: UK students, EU students Funding amount: EU/UK fees and stipend in line with EPSRC rates Hours: Full Time Deadline for applications: 4th August 2017 PhD Supervisor: Corina Cirstea Project Description: As part of this project, you will work on developing new foundations for quantitative verification, grounded in the theory of coalgebras. Coalgebras are mathematical structures suited for modelling a large variety of state-based, dynamical systems, with features such as non-deterministic, stochastic, or weighted behaviour being uniformly captured in the models. Coalgebras come with modal and temporal logics that expressively support reasoning about the temporal behaviour of dynamical systems, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Owing to the diversity of semantic models that can be captured, coalgebra is the ideal framework for modelling and reasoning about heterogeneous systems whose components have different quantitative verification concerns. During your PhD, you will help build a synergy between the fields of coalgebraic methods and automated verification, and will publish at internationally leading conferences and journals. Your project will contribute to the development of a new research area of coalgebraic model checking, aimed on the one hand at unifying existing quantitative model checking techniques, and on the other at extending the applicability of such techniques to complex systems, whose modelling requires a variety of underlying models. Application areas for such techniques include, but are not limited to: cloud computing, with a need for analyzing the efficiency of resource-management operations; industrial control systems, with a need for energy-aware controller synthesis; and cyber security, with a need for resource-aware reasoning about system-attacker interactions. More details about the project can be found here: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BBD448/phd-studentship-automated-verification-thro... Candidate profile: • good undergraduate degree in mathematics or computer science (required), • interest in theoretical computer science/logic/automated verification (required), • good programming skills (desirable). For further details about the project, please contact Dr Corina Cirstea (cc2@ecs.soton.ac.uk). Application process: To apply, please email your CV, transcript of your degree and a brief statement of research interests to cc2@ecs.soton.ac.uk. ---------------------------------------------- Dr Corina Cirstea Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Southampton, SO17 1BJ United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3625 ---------------------------------------------- [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]