(3 years)

Applications are invited to apply for one of our seven three-year PhD studentships, supported by the School of Engineering and Applied Science, to be undertaken within the Computer Science Research Group at Aston University. The successful applicant will join the newly formed Aston Institute for Systems Analytics.

This studentship is combined with a teaching assistant role. The successful candidate will be required to carry out up to seven hours per week of teaching support for a distance learning programme under the direction of the project supervisor; therefore the student must be capable of teaching on a specific module. Details of teaching responsibilities can be found here and a list of taught modules can be found here.

These positions are available starting from January 2015 (subject to negotiation) with teaching beginning in March 2015.

Financial Support

This studentship includes a fee bursary to cover the home/EU fees rate plus a maintenance allowance of £15,500 in 2014/15. Applicants from outside the EU may apply for this studentship but will need to pay the difference between the ‘Home/EU’ and the ‘Overseas’ tuition fees, currently this is £10,914 in 2014/15.

Background of the Projects

This research proposal is based on a new paradigm for Software Engineering (SE), called requirements-awareness (also known as requirements reflection), in which requirements are reified as runtime entities. This allows systems to dynamically reason about themselves at the level of the requirements - in a similar way that architectural reflection currently allows runtime reasoning at the level of the software architecture. We believe that requirements-awareness (i.e. requirements reflection) will support the development and management of self-adaptive systems (SAS) because it will raise the level of discourse at which a software system is able to reflect upon itself.

For further details of the project please visit the Computer Science research website athttp://www.aston.ac.uk/eas/about-eas/academic-groups/computer-science/research/

Please note that a maximum of three projects can be applied for, and a project proposal should be submitted for each project as part of your application.  The proposal should detail your relevant experience and knowledge of the subject, and details of how you intend to develop the research problem and structure your research as part of the project team.

Person Specification

The successful applicant should have a first class or upper second class honours degree or equivalent qualification in computer science, mathematics, engineering or a related discipline. Programming experience and excellent analytical and presentational skills, along with a demonstrable interest in the chosen research topic, are essential.

The online application form, reference forms and details of entry requirements, including English language are available at http://www1.aston.ac.uk/eas/research/prospective-research-students/how-to-apply/