[Please circulate to all those who might be interested, and accept my
apologies if you received multiple copies of this PhD studentship
announcement]
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PhD Studentship

Hyper-heuristics in Co-operative Search

University of Nottingham - School of Computer Science

This studentship is associated with the Science and Innovation award for
"The LANCS Initiative" (see: http://www.lancs-initiative.ac.uk/). The
successful student will join the Automated Scheduling, OptimisAtion and
Planning (ASAP) research group (see: http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/) and
will investigate 'systems to build systems' in the context of co-operative
search and will have the opportunity to interact with the leading
scientists in the field.

The interest in parallel co-operative approaches has risen considerably
due to, not only the availability of co-operative environments at low
cost, but also their success to provide novel ways to combine different
(meta-)heuristics. Current research has shown that the parallel execution
and co-operation of several (meta-)heuristics could improve the quality of
the solutions that each of them would be able to find by itself working on
a standalone basis. Moreover, parallel and distributed approaches can be
used to provide more powerful and robust problem solving environments in a
variety of problem domains. Hyper-heuristics, on the other hand, represent
a set of search methodologies which are applicable to different problem
domains. They aim to raise the level of generality, for example by
choosing and/or generating new methodologies on demand during the search
process. The goal of this study is to explore the cooperative search
mechanisms within a hyper-heuristic framework. This exciting research area
lies at the interface between operational research and computer science
and involves understanding of (distributed) decision making mechanisms and
learning, design, implementation and analysis of automated search
methodologies. The application domains will be cross disciplinary.

Students should have at least an upper second-class honours degree
(ideally a first class degree), or a combination of qualifications and/or
experience equivalent to that level.  Knowledge of agent based/distributed
computing, parallel processing and/or parallel/multi-core programming
experience is extremely desirable. Preferably, students should have an
undergraduate or Masters Degree in computer science, operational research,
mathematics or closely related area. Students with a mathematical
background and good programming experience are also encouraged to apply.

This studentship is available for 3 years and includes an approximate
maintenance grant of 13,300 per year, maintenance grant and UK/EU tuition
fees.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to Dr E Ozcan, see:
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~exo/ or Email: [log in to unmask]  Please note
that applications sent direct to this email address will not be accepted.

To apply, please access:
http://pgstudy.nottingham.ac.uk/apply-for-postgraduate-courses.aspx.

Please quote ref. SCI/847.

Closing date: 25 June 2010.