AI4ME (BBC Prosperity Partnership) - PhD Studentship in Computer Networking & Distributed Systems

AI4ME is an exciting five-year EPSRC & BBC-funded Prosperity Partnership that is addressing the key challenges involved in creating and delivering personalised content at scale. AI4ME brings together the BBC, Lancaster University and the University of Surrey to design entirely new types of media experiences that can adapt to individual preferences, accessibility requirements, devices, and location. This is a unique opportunity for students to join a major new research partnership and take advantage of this vibrant collaborative research environment.

AI4ME builds upon the rapid changes underway within the industry in how media experiences are produced and delivered, from television and films to video games. In television and broadcast media, the prevalence of Internet-based delivery supports the independent transport of different parts of a stream – including audio, video, and additional media experience components – to be composed together at the point of playback. This paradigm is enabling new forms of hyper-personalised and immersive storytelling and represents both opportunities and new challenges in the network delivery of these experiences.

We are looking for a PhD candidate to be part of our exciting journey in building the world’s first hyper-adaptive end-to-end delivery infrastructure to deliver personalised object-based media on an unprecedented scale. This will require research in computer networking and distributed systems. The following represent possible areas that could form the basis of your PhD:

• Novel Self-Adaptive Distributed Systems Paradigms: new approaches to building distributed systems, in which self-adaptive behaviours are at the core of the system’s capability.
• Distributed Reinforcement Learning: developing new techniques which scale well for state-of-the-art real-world stream processing systems.
• Orchestration Methods, Models, and Languages: how orchestration models or languages can be used within a highly adaptive deployment infrastructure to provide services that meet specific delivery criteria.

This PhD position offers great flexibility and we welcome the opportunity to explore other ideas & themes.

Requirements

You will have a 1st or 2:1 (Hons) degree in Computer Science (or related field), or a Master's (or equivalent) in a relevant engineering or scientific discipline or equivalent specialist experience. You need to have a genuine interest in computer networking or distributed systems. 

Funding

These PhD studentships are open to UK students and cover university tuition fees for 4 years and a tax-free maintenance grant (stipend) of £19,237k per annum. The studentships also include funding to support travel costs to present research at national and international conferences.

Start Date

September 2024, with the flexibility to start later if necessary

General enquiries are welcomed by Professor Nicholas Race by email: networkedsystems@lancaster.ac.uk