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From: iwh@aisb.ed.ac.uk (Ian Harrison)
Subject: AI PhD Opportunity in Edinburgh, Scotland
Message-ID: <DEFtEv.IK2@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Sender: news@aisb.ed.ac.uk (Network News Administrator)
Reply-To: iwh@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Ian Harrison)
Organization: AIAI, Edinburgh University, Scotland
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 1995 14:54:30 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai:33122 comp.ai.edu:2736

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
PhD STUDENTSHIP IN AI PLANNING RESEARCH

An opportunity exists for a PhD candidate to join the O-Plan Project's
research team in the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute
(AIAI) at Edinburgh University.  This team is engaged on collaborative
work at international level in the areas of planning, scheduling and
reactive control for tasks such as logistics, aerospace planning,
information management, etc.

Recently, the O-Plan project's application focus has been on Logistics
planning, and Non-combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) planning for
crisis situations.  Work is likely to continue on NEOs, with new work on
Air Campaign Planning.  These are the focal applications of the
ARPA/Rome Laboratory Planning Initiative of which the O-Plan project is
a part.

Prospective applicants can get access to the work of the O-Plan group on
the WWW (http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~oplan/).  Paper copies are also
available to those without access to the Internet by contacting
Professor Austin Tate at the address given below.  Applicants are
encouraged to propose work areas of interest to themselves which they
feel would complement the work of the O-Plan team.

Possible areas of interest include (but are not limited to):

	*	the improvement of plan feasibility analysis during plan
		generation
	*	the efficacy of adopting a business case development
		approach to generating multiple, qualitatively different
		plans
	*	the dialogue between the task assignment and planning
		agents
	*	taskable information gathering agents
	*	personable network-aware agents

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Support Available

Support for living expenses (approximately 5,500 pounds per annum),
University of Edinburgh fees (7,860 pounds per annum) and a small travel
budget are to be made available to a suitable candidate.  The support is
available for 3 years to a student starting his or her studies in 1995.

------------------------------------------------------------

O-Plan

O-Plan is a command, planning and control architecture with an open
modular structure intended to allow experimentation on or replacement of
various components.  The research is seeking to determine which
functions are generally required in a number of application areas and
across a number of different command, planning, scheduling and control
systems.

O-Plan aims to demonstrate how a planner, situated in a task assignment
and plan execution (command and control) environment, and using
extensive domain knowledge, can allow for flexible, distributed,
collaborative, and mixed-initiative planning.  The research is seeking
to verify this total system approach by studying a simplified
three-level model with separable task assignment, plan generation and
plan execution agents.

O-Plan has been applied to logistics tasks that require flexibility of
responses for changing situations.

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Edinburgh and AI at Edinburgh

Edinburgh is one of the most pleasant capital cities in the world. 
Travel, historical and general information on Edinburgh can be found
in the city's Tourist Guide:
      (http://www.efr.hw.ac.uk/EDC/Edinburgh.html)

The University of Edinburgh is one of the foremost Information
Technology Research and Teaching Universities in Europe, and its AI
Department is one of the top in the world.  The student would be located
within the Department of AI with supervision taking place from the
O-Plan team within AIAI, including Professor Austin Tate.

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University Postgraduate Entry as a Student

The objective of the PhD programme is to produce a research worker who
has acquired good all-round knowledge of Artificial intelligence, in
depth knowledge of a specialist area, and the research skills to carry
out and present a piece of original research for submissions for a
postgraduate degree.

The MPhil and PhD degrees require a minimum of two and three years
supervised study respectively, and are awarded on the basis of a thesis
and an oral examination.

A student who enters the higher degree programme will be registered as a
supervised postgraduate student.  In the first year, he or she will be
expected to attend lectures relevant to his/her research topic.  These
lectures will be selected from the modules offered to MSc candidates.
Students are also encouraged to attend the meetings of Special Interest
Groups relevant to their area of interest.  Most research groups in the
Department have such meetings on a regular basis.

Although course work is not examined formally, each student is required
to give two presentations during the first year.  In order to register
as an MPhil/PhD candidate at the beginning of the second year of study,
a student must submit a thesis proposal not later than 9 months after
the date of entry.

An applicant should have a first or upper second class honours degree
(or equivalent of) in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science,
Education, Electrical Engineering, Psychology, Mathematics, Philosophy
or related subject.

Preference will be given to applicants with a Masters Degree in
Artificial Intelligence/Knowledge Based Systems, or equivalent.

If you would like to be considered for admission as a postgraduate
student, please obtain an application form, and return along with a copy
of your transcripts/degree certificates, to:

Admissions Secretary
Department of Artificial Intelligence
University of Edinburgh
5 Forrest Hill
EDINBURGH EHl 2QL
United Kingdom
E-mail:  judith@aifh.ed.ac.uk
Fax:     +44 (131) 650 6899

An applicant from a non-English speaking country must enclose a copy of
an English Language certificate with their application (minimum scores
required by the University are: TOEFL - 550; IELTS - 6.0)

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Contact for Further Information:

Professor Austin Tate
Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute
University of Edinburgh
80 South Bridge
EDINBURGH EH1 1HN
United Kingdom
E-mail:  a.tate@ed.ac.uk
Tel:	 +44 (131) 650 2732
Fax:     +44 (131) 650 6513
WWW:     URL: http//www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~oplan/

