Structured PhD Programme: Prospective Students
Welcome to the webpages of the Structured Ph.D. programme of the School of Computer Science and Statistics. In these pages you will find information about the course for both prospective and current students. This includes information on the sources of funding and a list of supervisors who are looking to support new students, regulations of the programme and available course modules.
The School of Computer Science and Statistics comprises of five disciplines: computer systems, information systems, intelligent systems, software systems and statistics. All these disciplines have extensive research programmes that lead to a Ph.D. in either computer science (for the first 4 of the above disciplines) or statistics.
Ph.D. in Computer Science
The objective of the four computer science disciplines is that its Ph.D. students undertake world-class research in this field that will have a demonstrable impact on society at large and, in so doing, to have trained the researchers and academics of the future. The disciplines' teaching philosophy is to educate its students to be designers of large complex systems involving hardware, software or a combination of both, and to prepare them to embrace future developments in computer science. Courses in computer science are oriented towards different fields such as engineering, information systems, ubiquitous computing, networks and distributed systems, natural language processing, multimedia systems and health informatics, and Ph.D. students choose from and take these courses in the first 18 months of their study.
Current research in computer science covers a wide range of topics from the theoretical to the applied. Much of this research is funded by the EU, national funding agencies such as Science Foundation Ireland and the Higher Education Authority as well as both indigenous and multinational companies. Staff research interests include: distributed systems including middleware and ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligence, especially logic programming, neural networks and case-based reasoning, cognitive science, computational linguistics, natural language processing, computer vision and robotics, image processing, networks and telecommunications including network management, security, electronic commerce and mobile communications, computer architecture, grid computing, multimedia servers, computer graphics, image synthesis and animation, virtual reality, multimedia systems, information systems and management, management of ICT, health informatics, and formal methods.
Ph.D. in Statistics
The Discipline of Statistics was founded in 1966 as a separate department and merged with Computer Science in 2005. It contains one of the most active research groups in this field in Ireland. The research interests of its staff and graduate students include: modern computationally intensive tools in both Bayesian and classical statistics (techniques which are driven by new applications in science and engineering), theoretical work on modern regression methods, and specialist applications of statistics in business, industry and society.
Projects currently supporting research students under funding from national and international agencies include: Bayesian statistical computation using functional approximations like Laplace and variational Bayes, palaeoclimate reconstruction, source separation for multi-spectral astronomical images, estimating species diversity in marine animals, failure and reliability of complex telecommunications networks and optimal road traffic management.