[Please forward to anyone interested. Apologies for multiple mailing.] ========================================================================= School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham Ph.D. Studentship in Probabilistic Model Checking ========================================================================= One PhD studentship is available in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham to work on probabilistic model checking under the supervision of Professor Marta Kwiatkowska. Probabilistic model checking is an automatic verification method that can establish whether a given specification holds for a probabilistic system. For example, for the randomised Bluetooth protocol one might obtain quantitative answers to the expected time to device discovery and the probability of delivery by a deadline. PRISM (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~dxp/prism/), the leading and widely used probabilistic model checker developed at the University of Birmingham under Kwiatkowska's leadership, is an open source tool that has been used to model and analyse over 30 real-world protocols, with flaws discovered in six of those. PRISM is a symbolic model checker, and it combines numerical solution techniques, simulation-based methods (for approximate analysis) and parallelization. This project is to contribute to the implementation of probabilistic model checking techniques within PRISM. Possible topics include an extension of probabilistic model checking to real source code, statistical model checking, efficient algorithms and data structures, probabilistic real-time verification and online analysis methods. More detail about this project is available at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mzk/research_probmc_stud.html Applicants are encouraged to contact Marta Kwiatkowska directly (email: mzk@cs.bham.ac.uk) and refer to her group's work on probabilistic modelling and verification (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/systems/probabilistic/). The studentship is available for UK and European applicants who want to work full time on their research degree and lasts for up to three years. Candidates should have, or be predicted to gain, a very good degree in computer science, mathematics or a relevant scientific discipline. Informal inquiries are welcome, preferably via e-mail. Information about admission for PhD in Computer Science at the University of Birmingham is available at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-research/. Applications can be made until 10th July 2005. Professor Marta Kwiatkowska, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT. E-mail: mzk@cs.bham.ac.uk URL: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mzk Tel: +44 121 4147264 Fax: +44 121 4144281 21-Jun-2005 14:05:02 -0300,1768;000000000001-00000018