Dr. Daron Green, Director, Microsoft Research writes:
As part of this, the Microsoft Research PhD Scholarship Programme, has, since 2004, awarded annual grants to fund more than 200 academic research projects in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) region. The project proposals are submitted by PhD supervisors, who then collaborate with an assigned Microsoft Research co-supervisor to support a PhD student for up to three years, as he or she carries out the proposed research project.
We are pleased to announce that 19 PhD projects, split across six EMEA countries, have been selected for 2015 scholarships and will receive funding and collaborative assistance, starting in the academic year 2015–2016. Among these were seven proposals that grew out of our ongoing collaborations with University College London and Edinburgh University (see Initiative Celebrates Industry-Academia Collaboration; Sound the Bagpipes: Joint Initiative in Informatics Announced).
Below is a list of the selected projects, including the PhD supervisor and the institution:
- ByPASS: Building Programming Abstractions for Packet Processing on CPUs, Graphics PR
Evangelos Markatos, FORTH-ICS, Greece - Designing for Spatial Sharing - Architectural Thinking as an Approach to Technology Design
Marianne Graves Petersen, Aarhus University, Denmark - Designing the Design of the Internet of Things
Ashley Hall, Royal College of Art, UK - Fast, Flexible and Functional Software
Anil Madhavapeddy, University of Cambridge, UK - Global Fitness Maximising Approaches to Evaluate the Trade-Offs Involved in the Evergreen and Deciduous Conundrum
Peter van Bodegom, Leiden University, the Netherlands - History-Aware Testing
Andreas Zeller, Saarland University, Germany - Model Worlds - Interacting with Machines which Read the Future
James Auger, Royal College of Art, UK - Preference Elicitation and Mechanism Design for Complex Dynamic Systems
Sven Seuken, University of Zurich, Switzerland - Real World Data with Dependent Types: Integrity and Interoperation
Conor McBride, University of Strathclyde, UK - Reasoning about Racy Programs under Relaxed Consistency
Susmit Sarkar, University of St Andrews, UK - Safe, Natural, and Efficient Probabilistic Programming
Frank Wood, University of Oxford, UK - Sequential Structured Prediction
Peter Gehler, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany
Joint Initiative with University College London:
- Capture of Real-World Non-Rigid Scenes from a Single RGB Camera
Lourdes Agapito - Constructing Robust Synthetic Gene Feedback Systems using a Combined Experimental and Bayesian Approach
Chris Barnes - Controlled Malleability in Cryptography
Sarah Meiklejohn - Image Quality Transfer
Daniel Alexander
Joint Initiative with Informatics with University of Edinburgh:
- Formal Decompositions of Strongly Coupled Systems
Vincent Danos - Self-Optimising Internet Services
Hugh Leather - System-Level Support for Persistent Memory
Stratis Viglas
You can learn more about these projects on the 2015 projects page. PhD supervisors are actively recruiting for these projects; candidate selection should be complete by the end of March 2016.
We’d like to thank all of this year’s applicants, and we’re looking forward to September 1, 2015, when the submission tool for the 2016 applications will open. Remember, no researcher is an island, especially when it comes to applying computer science for the benefit of society.