PI: Professor Michael Beer (Engineering)

CIs: Dr Athanasios Pantelous (Mathematical Sciences)
Professor John Mottershead (Engineering)

Large scale funding totalling £21M has been secured to establish a Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) within the Institute for Risk and Uncertainty. This CDT is jointly funded by EPSRC and ESRC with a grant of around £4M. The University of Liverpool will invest more than £6M and 36 industrial and academic partners will contribute more than £10M in the form of access to facilities, models and data. The CDT partners will provide workplaces and supervision for PhD students during industrial placements as well as training at summer schools and workshops.

The CDT will address industrial and societal needs, at the local and global scales, which arise from the rapidly growing complexity of systems of various kinds, their environment and associated risks and uncertainties.

Risk is the potential of experiencing a loss when a system does not operate as expected due to the occurrence of uncertain, difficult-to-predict, events. Problems of risk and uncertainty are ubiquitous. They occur for example in (1) the modelling and design of engineering systems and structures; (2) the impact of human activity on the natural environment, ecosystems, civil infrastructure and society; (3) financial transactions, markets and trading of currencies, stocks and shares etc. Risk assessment requires the quantification of not only the direct cost of system failure but also the accompanying multi-faceted failure consequences that cascade across the boundaries of very different disciplines and sectors of society. This is illustrated by disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil-spill, Hurricane Katrina, the Fukushima nuclear incident and the global financial crisis, where in each case failure in technical and management systems caused an avalanche of inter-related effects in environmental, financial, and social systems.

In the CDT, training will be provided for 76 PhDs over 8 years within a mathematical/scientific framework providing the essential tools needed to address multi-/inter-disciplinary problems of risk and uncertainty. The CDT is supported by 25 industrial partners, non-profit making foundations or national laboratories and 11 overseas university partners. Each PhD project will have at least two supervisors from different disciplines and will involve two six-month placements with partner organisations.

The CDT provides a unique opportunity in the UK (and possibly in the world) for training PhDs who are able to communicate across the boundaries of the old disciplines of engineering, mathematics, economics, the environmental sciences and psychology. Those trained in this way will be able not only to enumerate the risks associated with a particular activity or process, but also to express clearly the meaning of the risk to the general public and decision makers. They will be able to cross the divide between mathematical intricacy and explanation in common language.

CDT Research Projects Available

The studentships are granted for 4 years and include, in the first year, a Master in Decision Making under Risk & Uncertainty. The projects include extensive collaboration with prime industry to build an optimal basis for employability.

• Early warning risk identification and assessment system via topic detection on audiovisual news streams (Electrical Engineering & Electronics / Computer Science)
• Circular Layouts Representation of the Interbank Systems (Mathematical Sciences / Engineering)
• Finding Hidden Structure in Financial Networks (Mathematical Sciences / Engineering)
• Volatility Clustering in Financial Markets: A Network Theory Approach (Mathematical Sciences / Engineering)
• Advanced Spatio-Temporal Analysis With Application to Understanding Storm Impacts around the UK (Electrical Engineering & Electronics / Environmental Sciences)
• Effects of odours on economic decision making: behavioural and electrophysiological studies (Psychological Sciences / Mathematical Sciences)
• Development of a Robust Client Interface Design Decision Tool (Engineering / Architecture)
• Development of Sensible Structural Restoration and Refurbishment Analysis Methods (Engineering / Architecture)
• Risk and uncertainty in the manufacturing supply chain (Computer Science / Engineering)
• Vibration Reduction Through Stochastic Control and Approximate Dynamic Programming (Engineering / Mathematics)
• The interaction of psychological, organisational and social factors in reducing latent error and risk in engineering safety (Architecture / Psychology / Engineering)
• A Non-market Assessment of Precautionary Approaches to Regulating Hazardous Chemicals (Environmental Sciences / Institute of Infection & Global Health)
• An Integrated Computational Environment for Strategic and Sustainable Life Cycle Asset Management (Architecture / Mathematical Sciences)
• Valuation of Pro-active Asset Integrity Management (Architecture / Mathematical Sciences)
• Institutional Resilience? - Developing an Enhanced Model for Catchment Based Governance (Planning / Social Sciences / Geography)
• Dog Bite Risk: Perception and Prevention (Public Health / Veterinary Science)
• Assessment of Natural Water Retention Measures in Reducing Flood Risk (Environmental Sciences / Engineering)
• Reliability/Robustness-Based Approaches and Computational Tools for Multidisciplinary Systems under Mixed Aleatory and Epistemic Uncertainty (Engineering / Environmental Sciences)
• Efficient and Energy-Aware Software for Stochastic Analysis on Large-Scale Systems (Engineering / Computer Science)
• Reinforced Concrete Response to Near Field Explosions (Civil / Structural Engineering)
• Risk and uncertainties in applying ‘Working with Natural Processes’ approaches to river management (Environmental Sciences / Engineering)
• Extrapolating the Very Rare from the Quite Rare (Electrical Engineering, Electronics & Computer Science / Mathematics / Engineering
• Manipulating Linguistic Articulations of Uncertainty (Electrical Engineering, Electronics & Computer Science / Engineering)
• Fragility analysis in Seismic Safety Cases for critical systems and nuclear installations (Engineering / Environmental Science)
• Optimization and Fuzzy rules in Finance, Forecasting and Trading (Mathematical Sciences / Engineering)
• Human Errors in Construction (Engineering / Psychology / Architecture)
• Performance-based earthquake engineering (Engineering / Mathematical Sciences)
• Earthquake load characterisation based on sparse data (Engineering / Environmental Sciences /Mathematical Sciences)
• Risk assessment for offshore operations under severe subjective uncertainty (Engineering / Psychology)
• Risk assessment for complex offshore installations (Engineering / Mathematical Sciences)
• Offshore structure safety assessment based on limited and fragmental data (Engineering / Mathematical Sciences)
• Robust maintenance scheduling for offshore structures (Engineering / Mathematical Sciences)
• Quantification of expert assessments for manufacturing simulations (Engineering / Mathematical Sciences)
• Next-Generation Earthquake Ground Motion Prediction Models for Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis (Environmental Sciences / Engineering)
• The Impact of Uncertainty in the Design of Advanced Nuclear Systems (Engineering / Mathematical Sciences)
• The Impact of Uncertainty in Nuclear Fusion Tokamak Discharges (Engineering / Computer Science)
• Stigmergy-based mapping of indoor hazardous environments (Computer Science / Engineering)
• Efficient Selection of Approximations for Computationally Expensive Models (Engineering / Electrical Engineering, Electronics & Computer Science)
• Structural health monitoring using probabilistic classification and reliability methods (Engineering / Electrical Engineering, Electronics & Computer Science)
• Efficient numerical analysis of infrastructure networks (Engineering / Mathematical Sciences)

Further information on each of the above projects can be found at: 
www.liv.ac.uk/risk-and-uncertainty/postgraduate/cdt-research-projects-available/

Please apply online to the School of Engineering providing the title and the name of the primary supervisor: 
www.liv.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/applying/index.htm

Applications deadline: 30th April 2015

Start date: October 2015