Artificial Intelligence PhD Excellence Scholarship with Microsoft Research Asia Internship (Feb 2021 Entry)
| Reference: |
20043MSRA |
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| Length of Scholarships: |
up to 36 months, subject to satisfactory progression |
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| Places: |
2 |
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| Closing Date: |
30 September 2020 |
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School of Computer Science, UNNC shall collaborate with top scientists from Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) to jointly recruit and train PhD students on the topics of artificial intelligence, optimisation and their applications in transportation and logistics
The available PhD scholarships cover:
- Tuition fee
- Monthly stipend (RMB4,500)
- Medical insurance with designated providers
- All above items are covered for up to 36 months based on satisfactory progression
- All regulations set out in the UNNC PGR Scholarship Policy apply
- An internship opportunity at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) will be available in Year 2 should the student’s academic performance in Year 1 meet the requirement of MSRA. If a student successfully secures an MSRA internship, the stipend for the duration of the student’s MSRA internship shall be replaced with MSRA standard internship allowance plus accommodation.
In addition to the above scholarship, successful candidates also have the opportunity to carry out paid teaching (after the completion of Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) training) or research assistant duties at UNNC since second year of their PhD programmes.
Available PhD research areas:
The research shall focus on forefront technologies in artificial intelligence, optimisation, data analytics, machine learning and their applications in solving difficult transportation and logistics problems, including
- Reinforcement learning
- Evolutionary computation/Metaheuristics/Hyper-heuristics
- Modelling and Simulation
- Operations Research
- Real-life transportation/logistics optimisation
Supervisory Team
The supervision team of each student includes two top academics from the School of Computer Science (UNNC/UNUK), and NUBS China, and one MSRA full-time researcher. Students shall have excellent opportunities to work in MSRA as student interns. At present, the supervisors from MSRA are:
Dr. Tie-Yan Liu
Tie-Yan Liu is an assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, leading the machine learning research area. Tie-Yan Liu is a fellow of the IEEE, and a distinguished member of the ACM. His Google Scholar h-index is 48. He is very well known for his pioneer work on learning to rank and computational advertising, and his recent research interests include deep learning, reinforcement learning, and distributed machine learning. Many of his technologies have been transferred to Microsoft’s products and online services (such as Bing, Microsoft Advertising, Windows, Xbox, and Azure), and open-sourced through Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK), Microsoft Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK), and Microsoft Graph Engine. He has also been actively contributing to academic communities. He is an adjunct/honorary professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), University of Nottingham, and several other universities in China. He has published 200+papers in refereed conferences and journals, with over 17000 citations. He has won quite a few awards, including the best student paper award at SIGIR (2008), the most cited paper award at Journal of Visual Communications and Image Representation (2004-2006), the research break-through award (2012) and research-team-of-the-year award (2017) at Microsoft Research, and Top-10 Springer Computer Science books by Chinese authors (2015), and the most cited Chinese researcher by Elsevier (2017). He has been invited to serve as general chair, program committee chair, local chair, or area chair for a dozen of top conferences including SIGIR, WWW, KDD, ICML, NIPS, IJCAI, AAAI, ACL, ICTIR, as well as associate editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, ACM Transactions on the Web, and Neurocomputing.
More details please visit his profile: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/tyliu/
Dr. Weidong Ma
Weidong Ma is an Associate Researcher in Machine Learning Group, Microsoft Research Asia. His research interests include machine learning, AI for logistics, reinforcement learning, computational advertising, mechanism design, and combinatorial optimization. He received his B.S. from Shandong University (2008) and Ph.D. from Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2013), both in Operations Research. He authored tens of academic research papers receiving hundreds of citations, and serves as a reviewer for a few international conferences and journals.
More details please visit his profile: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/weima/
PhD programme structure
PhD programmes at the UNNC are composed of 3 years research and a 1 year thesis pending period for full time PhDs. Full time PhDs are expected to submit their theses within a maximum of four years from initial registration. PhD supervision is undertaken jointly by academics from the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) and the University of Nottingham UK (UNUK). On successful completion, students will be awarded the University of Nottingham PhD degree, and no reference will be made on the degree certificate as to where the degree has been completed. The University of Nottingham PhD degree will be accredited by the Chinese Ministry of Education.
Eligibility
Applicants must have a first class honours undergraduate degree or 65% and above for a Masters’ degree from a British university, or the equivalent from other institutions.
Applicants must meet the required English language proficiency for the relevant subject area. IELTS 6.5 (minimum 6.0 in all elements) or its equivalent is required for Faculty of Science and Engineering (FoSE) scholarship applicants.
More details can be found on the ‘entry requirements’ page of the website.
How to apply
No separate application is required for applying for a scholarship but please make sure you quote the scholarship reference number in your PhD application form. It normally takes 7-8 weeks for a final decision to be made after the closing date. List of required documents can be found on the ‘how to apply’ page.