Example Possible PhD Projects

We present a list of possible PhD projects.

If you are interested in any of the following ideas then you should contact the relevant member of staff, then after determining a suitable supervisor you should officially apply.

For details of how to apply and other information see our main PhD admissions page.

Select a research area to prune the list below;

Picture	Staff Member	Research Groups	Projects
	Dr Rafal Bogacz	Intelligent Systems	My research focuses on computational neuroscience, and in particular on computational models of decision making in the mammalian brain. Specifically, I investigate what computations are performed in the neural circuits during choice processes, and how our decisions are influenced by previously obtained rewards, and other information stored in memory. I would be very happy to advise PhD students working on these questions.
No	Dr Tilo Burghardt	Intelligent Systems Computer Vision
	Dr Andrew Calway	Computer Vision
	Dr Neill Campbell	Computer Vision
	Dr Kirsten Cater	Interaction & Graphics	My current research interest is in the area of Experience Design and I am a firm believer in the value of user participation to guide the future of technology and technological experiences. This research is concentrated around two major questions: What makes a technology experience compelling? How do you design for technology experiences? I carry out public trials with novel technologies so that I can understand how people interact with them and then use this understanding along with my technical expertise to develop new frameworks and models to guide the future of technology and technological experiences. I am looking for potential PhD students who preferably have user trial experience yet also have a technical CS background to research in the areas: Spatialised Sound, Locative Gaming, Gesture Recognition, Location Based Services & Interaction with Public Displays
	Mr Andrew Charlesworth
	Prof David Cliff	HARE	I am pretty busy running the LSCITS project (www.lscits.org) but would nevertheless be interested in supervising projects that are relevant to LSCITS, especially the use of market-based control control techniques for decentralized dynamic resource allocation in large-scale networks of IT systems, and/or the use of automated optimization techniques (especially genetic algorithms, or their more statistically rigorous derivatives such as Estimation of Distribution Algorithms) for the automated design or fine-tuning of LSCITS systems.
	Dr Raphaël Clifford	HARE	My work focuses on the design of new algorithms and data structures with particular emphasis on their asymptotic time and space complexity. If you have a strong background in theoretical computer science and discrete maths/probability then I am happy to consider any applications. Particular areas of recent interest in my group are: Combinatorial pattern matching. The design of fast pattern matching algorithms in a number of models including for different measures of approximation, where space is limited, where time is bounded per input character and so on. Approximation algorithms for NP-Hard problems. Algorithms for scheduling work to reduce power consumption.
No	Dr David Coyle
	Prof Nello Cristianini	Intelligent Systems	The web is the natural playground for intelligent systems technology (AI) and we are intrested in deploying state-of-the-art machine learning, pattern analysis, and text processing to various aspects of the next WWW. We are interested in mining news, in analysing speech and images, in modelling users' behaviour, and any other related task. The goal is to create intelligent behaviour in software operating within the web, so that the system is aware of a vast amount of up-to-date information and vast amounts of background knowledge, and uses them in its interaction with its users. Can a computer system _understand_ what is the information that a user needs? Can a computer system _generate_ that information? Every existing aspect of artificial intelligence, and many not-yet-existing aspects, will be needed to answer this.
	Mr Colin Dalton	Interaction & Graphics
	Dr Dima Damen	Computer Vision	Computer Vision, Image Processing, Automatic Surveillance, Object Detection, Video Analysis, Activity Recognition. Current project ideas can be found here
	Dr Kerstin Eder	HARE	Design Verification: Specification, verification and analysis techniques which allow designers to define a design and to verify/explore its behaviour in terms of functional correctness, performance, power consumption and energy efficiency. Techniques include both formal methods and traditional simulation-based approaches. I'm particularly interested in Correct by Construction approaches and Design for Verification. Verification of non-functional properties: Linking on-chip power consumption to application software, effectively developing methods for power profiling from silicon to software. Design for Verification in the context of Human Robot Interaction, essentially making sure robots operating in contact with humans are useful (liveness properties) and safe (safety properties).
	Prof Peter Flach	Intelligent Systems
	Dr Mike Fraser	Interaction & Graphics	I'm interested in research in which you build and prototype devices and evaluate their use by people. I'm currently interested in device designs that incorporate motors, pens and paper, and systems to support working with old and sensitive artefacts such as books, manuscripts and paintings. Mobile arms and other low-cost mobile robotic devices, either as physically assistive technologies or as designs with additional functionality such as antennas, laser pointers, or gimbals. Techniques that innovative in paper-based applications especially for distributed collaboration. Projects might include tracking pens and paper to help spatial integration with digital displays. Supporting work with sensitive objects to ensure technologies fit with existing expensive or vulnerable artefacts, e.g. sensor systems that track exploration of physical objects.
	Dr Julian Gough	Intelligent Systems	My research area is Theoretical and Computational Molecular Biology. My PhD projects would be best suited to somebody with education in a biological science or computer science, but if sufficiently talented, any science/mathematics/technical degree. The following project titles are available: Protein and Genome evolution "Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution", so we are working towards a complete understanding of evolution at the molecular level. Human and Mouse interaction networks In collaboration with Japanese groups: the analysis of cutting edge high-throughput experiments with RNA and proteins across tissues and stages of development. Data-mining for experimental targets Exploiting the SUPERFAMILY database. Functional annotation of SCOP Unifying the 3D structure and function of proteins.
	Dr Steve Gregory	Intelligent Systems
	Dr Simon Hollis	HARE	I am interested in the development of computer architecture, in particular the design of many-core systems --- chips incorporating tens to hundreds of processing cores. Therefore, I would be particularly interested in supervising projects in the areas of: Networks-on-chip (NoC) related projects, in particular on: Interconnect, and/or memory, design or traffic modelling; Communication simulators; Development of parallelised algorithms (conventional algorithms tend to map badly to highly parallel structures, so there is lots of scope for the development of algorithms for our new designs); Interesting approaches to improving the reliability of networks or execution when both occur in parallel on unreliable hardware. I also maintain an interest in secure hardware, so alternative projects may be found here.
	Dr Ian Holyer	HARE
No	Dr Conor Houghton		I am mainly interested in mathematical neuroscience; in particular, in developing mathematical tools for understanding signal propagation and processing in the brain, I am also generally interested in computational neuroscience and in modelling neuronal systems.
	Dr Tim Kovacs	Intelligent Systems	I'm interested in ways machines can learn without a teacher, so they can do things which I can't, or do them better than I can. Hence I'm interested in reinforcement learning, evolutionary computation and ways of combining them. Things I'm interested in (but don't necessarily know much about) include: hybridising and unifying teacher-less learning methods playing games like chess, particularly with learning methods bio-inspired computing, particularly ways of formalising heuristics application of computer science to biology and psychology cognitive science psychology/philosophy of mind/cognitive science/AI programming languages, especially visual languages applying software engineering to machine learning (and science generally)
	Prof David May	HARE
	Dr Walterio Mayol-Cuevas	Computer Vision	I am interested in three related areas: Robotics: How to make better more intelligent machines that move and change things around? e.g. autonomous flying robots for industrial inspection. Computer Vision: Enable computers to be able to model and recognize places, objects and people. I am also into Augmented Reality and computer vision on mobile phones. Wearable Computing: To make sense of what happens around a person from "always on" sensors, in particular wearable cameras such as Google Glass. I would be very interested to hear about your areas of interest related to the above topics, as well as happy to discuss other project ideas. Please feel free to browse my current and previous research projects here.
	Mr Simon McIntosh-Smith	HARE
	Prof Majid Mirmehdi	Computer Vision	I am interested in a wide range of application areas in computer vision, including medical imaging, robotic vision, and some specific aspects of scene understanding, e.g. the recognition of text in the environment. I usually have topics of interest spanning these aspects of computer vision: texture analysis motion detection and tracking colour image sementation active contours Be sure to surf the Computer Vision link on the left to see examples of projects (past and present) in our group.
	Dr Elisabeth Oswald	Cryptography	My primary interest is in applied cryptography and cryptanalysis. Most of my research focuses around aspects of side-channel attacks, in particular power analysis attacks, which are the most researched area in side-channel attacks today. I have worked with a number of students on Bsc, Msc, and PhD level during my time in Austria, and also here in Bristol. I am co-author of the currently only book about power analysis attacks, I have provided training on this subject for various organisations, and I have been involved in running the flagship conference in the field of cryptographic hardware and embedded systems (CHES) in the last two years. I am interested in working with people whose ambition is to combine theory with practice, who take pleasure in trying out things in practice, and who like to contribute to a small team of experts.
	Dr Dan Page	Cryptography	I am interested mainly in practical aspects of cryptography; roughly speaking this covers implementation of cryptographic primitives (in hardware and/or software) and physical security (side-channel and fault attacks). My previous work has focussed on: Implementation using novel processors and/or hardware (e.g. implementation of cryptography on GPUs, multi-core and SIMD implementation of pairings). Novel side-channel attacks and countermeasures (e.g. non-deterministic processor designs, attacks using cache memory as a side-channel). Domain specific compiler/language support for cryptography (e.g. optimisation of ECC, automatic countermeasures again side-channel attack). I am also interested in the design of (general purpose) processors, compilers and programming languages.
	Prof Dhiraj Pradhan	HARE	The primary technological motivation for my research is the current power crisis in embedded systems and soft-error tolerance. Limitations on battery life and ever increasing computational demands on mobile computing result in a dramatic power mismatch in today’s technology. Moreover, system-level soft error has become an increasingly an important issue My research has a direct impact on technology and society. Due to the evolving next generation information processing systems, one of the challenges that we face is how efficient and scalable these highly sophisticated applications and their corresponding systems are and what can be done to optimize them using heterogeneous cores including ASICs; we aim at solving that issue. Also our research seeks to design hetrogeneous and fault tolerant many-core architectures which will allow for the energy efficient exploitation of parallelism.
	Dr Chris Preist	HARE Intelligent Systems	Projects addressing social or environmental sustainability challenges, including but not limited to; - Agent based simulation for design of environmental policies or strategies - The use of mobile apps and social media to engage communities with environmental or social issues; both design of the intervention and assessment of its effectiveness in the community. - The use of government environmental open data possibly incorporating semantic web technology. - Home heating and energy management systems. - Expert system or collaborative filtering advisors on low carbon lifestyle choices I am strongly motivated by engagement with external companies and NGOs to make projects ‘real world’, and have extensive contacts to make this happen.
	Dr Oliver Ray	Intelligent Systems
No	Dr Tom Scutt
	Prof Nigel Smart	Cryptography	I am interested in the interplay between theoretical and practical cryptography. Previous and current PhD projects include: Efficient Pairing Implementations We have worked on low level implementation of pairings, as well as developed higher level algorithms such as the Ate-pairing Provable Security of Schemes We have developed concepts such as wild-carded IBE, cryptographic workflow and created the SK-KEM ID-based encryption primitive currently being standardised by the IEEE. Protocol Analysis A current student is looking at developing security models for protocols such as TLS and various anti-DDoS schemes. ZK Proofs and MPC Via a recent EU grant we are now looking at applying our practical experience to areas such as ZK-proofs and Multi-Party Computation
	Dr Martijn Stam	Cryptography
	Dr Sriram Subramanian	Interaction & Graphics
	Dr Bogdan Warinschi	Cryptography	I am interested in foundations of security, mainly in proofs of cryptographic systems. In particular I work on: Computational soundness: This is a meta-theory that tries to bridge the gap between two entirely fundamentaly approaches for proving security of cryptographic systems one based on symbolic models, and one based on complexity and computability theory. Models and proofs for complex primitives: Here we aim to construct frameworks where interesting and useful cryptographic primitives can be designed and analyzed. Examples of such primitives include group and proxy signatures. Symbolic analysis: I am also interested in this area of research which is concerned with designing automated algorithms for proving security of systems.

Staff can edit their project ideas here.