LSCITS: Large Scale Complex IT Systems

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Vacancies for positions working with Dave Cliff

Summer Intern Positions

Please note that I have NO FUNDS available for prospective interns from outside the UK.

Doctoral Studentships

Current vacancies for PhD and EngD doctoral studentships are listed below.

We intend that the doctoral studentships listed here will commence by April 2010, but later start-dates may be agreed if necessary.

Each of the doctoral studentships described below will include opportunities to interact with members of the UK Large-Scale Complex IT Systems (LSCITS) research & training initiative: further details of the LSCITS Initiative are available at www.lscits.org.

 

One EPSRC Industrial CASE PhD studentship sponsored by BAE Systems

This is one of several studentships intended to form part of a strategic investment in PhD research by BAE Systems, partnering with the University of Bristol. In addition to the studentship listed here, BAE Systems have already sponsored an additional five doctoral studentships: three PhD students in Computer Science who commenced October 2009, and two EngDs in the Bristol/Bath Systems Engineering Doctorate Centre. The intention is that all six doctoral students will be offered co-located office space and facilities at the BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre (ATC) in Filton, six miles north of the University, in addition to the office space and facilities that they would ordinarily be offered at the University of Bristol. Staff from BAE's ATC have been involved in drafting the project specifications, and will act as industrial supervisors on these projects. BAE's sponsorship of these PhD studentships includes a significant supplement to the standard EPSRC annual stipend.

This is the first intake year for what is intended to be a multi-year collaboration between BAESystems and the University, so the number of doctoral students working together on BAE-funded and BAE-specified projects is expected to grow in coming years. Successful applicants to these doctoral studentships will be the founding members of what is intended to become a large and vibrant team of doctoral research students.

To apply for any one of the PhD positions below, please contact Dave Cliff directly on dc@cs.bris.ac.uk, or via the LSCITS Project Administrator Mrs Clare Williams, clare@cs.bris.ac.uk, +44 117 954 5161.

Please note that standard EPSRC terms and conditions apply to these studentships: full financial entitlements are available only to UK citizens; for citizens of EU countries other than the UK, no maintenance (living-expenses) grant is offered but the university fees may be paid from the studentship; non-EU citizens are not eligible for any financial support under this programme.

 

 

Large-Scale Situation Awareness for Service-Oriented Corporations.

Many corporations are in the process of transitioning from their traditional business models involving the sale of physical goods, to the provision of those same goods via a service operation. As an example: for many years civil airline companies purchased the jet engines that powered their aeroplanes, from aero-engine manufacturers; so the airline companies were responsible for financing the purchase of these assets, managing and maintaining the assets over their serviceable lifetime, and ultimately also for the disposal of those assets at the end of their lifetimes. In recent years, aero-engine manufacturers have moved to a "power by the hour" service-oriented business model, where the airline company pays the manufacturer only for each hour that the engine is actually producing thrust and propelling the 'plane: the engine remains the property of the engine-manufacturer, and that manufacturer is responsible for maintaining it and managing its disposal. Running such a service-oriented business requires a high-integrity global IT network, to receive data from the assets' (e.g. engines) on-board monitoring systems, allowing service crews to predict where and when they will be needed to maintain, repair, or replace that asset. The flow of information in such a service corporation's transcontinental and/or intercontinental IT network can be very high, and the potential consequences of misinformed decisions can be serious, giving rise to the need for tools and techniques that allow for clear corporate "situation awareness" (SA). For many large corporations moving to a service-oriented business model, the data flows can become so high that novel event-driven system architectures are required.

There is an existing research literature on SA in safety-critical systems such as air traffic control and military command (e.g., Jager-Adams et al, 1995; Endsley & Garland, 2000) , but the extent to which the tools and techniques for developed for those application areas are transferable to the needs of global service organizations is an open question, and forms the starting point for the research on this PhD; the specification for this PhD is deliberately open-ended, as the key contributions could lie in synthesis of ideas from areas as disparate as corporate governance factors for situational awareness (e.g. Siemieniuch & Sinclair, 2008), business analytics (e.g. Davenport & Harris, 2007), service-level agreements (e.g. Taylor & Tofts, 2005), new architectural principles (e.g. Taylor et al., 2009), or in some combination of all these (and other) areas.