A number of PhD research projects have been selected for funding through the last call of the Microsoft PhD Scholarship Programme. For some of these projects, PhD supervisors are seeking suitable students. The research projects listed on this page are currently accepting applications from PhD students.
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Usage of Static Analysis for Model Checking Liveness Properties of Heap Manipulating Programs
Supervisor: Nir Piterman, University of Leicester
Microsoft supervisor: Josh Berdine
To apply: Send CV and cover letter explaining your interest in the post to Nir Piterman.
Summary: One of the major challenges facing the successful application of model checking in software is the ability to analyze programs that use dynamic memory allocation and sophisticated data structures.
This project aims to investigate the advantages of considering more expressive versions of Kripke structures (such as modal transition systems and disjunctive modal transition systems) as an abstraction domain for shape analysis.
The project has two facets:
- In the context of static analysis, study the principles for extending the functionality of static analysis tools (such as TVLA) with this ability and the implications regarding preservation of branching-time temporal-logic properties and their automatic extraction.
- In the context of model checking, study the additional opportunities that are afforded by the augmentation of abstract heap information with fairness information in order to enable model checking of general temporal logic specifications that rely on boundedness and finiteness of heaps.
More details
Contact Nir Piterman with questions
Posted 28 April 2011
Screening of applications commenced on 8 July 2011 and will continue until the post is filled.
Image Understanding and Human Activity Recognition
Supervisor: Peter Gehler, research group leader, Max-Planck Institute for Informatics
Microsoft Research supervisor: Carsten Rother, researcher, Microsoft Research Cambridge
To apply: Send a cover letter and your CV in an email message to Dr. Peter Gehler.
Summary: This is a Microsoft Research Cambridge funded PhD scholarship in the area of computer vision and machine learning. The candidate should be interested in solving high-level computer vision tasks—that is, "making sense of images" by principled machine-learning models. The research includes designing and evaluating statistical models to solve ambitious tasks such as:
- Recognising objects and reason about their relations
- Reconstructing 3D scene information from image data using physics-based models
- Classifying human activities in video data
Posted 5 January 2011
