Prof P Warburton
No more applications being accepted
Funded PhD Project (European/UK Students Only)
About the Project
UCL EPSRC Industrial CASE award sponsored by and collaborating with British Telecom (BT)
Applications are invited for a fully funded EPSRC Industrial CASE PhD Studentship to work with Prof Paul Warburton (UCL Electrical Engineering and London Centre for Nanotechnology) on telecoms network optimisation using quantum annealing algorithms which will run on the DWave quantum processor.
The studentship will cover Home/EU tuition fees and an annual stipend of no less than £16,777, increasingly annually with inflation. The studentship is funded for 4 years on a full-time basis, or 6 years on a part-time basis. Part-time stipend figures are pro-rata.
The successful applicant is expected to start in September/October 2018.
Studentship Details
The goals of telecoms network optimisation are to provide a good quality of service to all customers, preventing network congestion, reducing wastage of energy and resource deployment, using the existing resources in an optimal way and helping to plan new deployment effectively. However, many of the problems that network providers seek to optimise are computationally hard problems that have no known algorithms for efficient solution that scale favourably with network size. In fact it is not possible to provide true optimisations for many large network problems, and even if relying on classical heuristic methods it is often not tractable to optimise large problems. The fundamental problems at the heart of network optimisation include canonical problems such as graph colouring and the Steiner tree.
Quantum annealing is a method of optimisation that exploits quantum effects such as tunnelling to find the solution to an optimisation problem. There is some existing work on the mapping of network problems to quantum annealers but much more work is needed to establish where a quantum advantage may exist.
In this project the student will develop algorithms to run on the D-Wave quantum annealing processor, with the ultimate goal of finding efficient solutions to the network optimisation problem.
Based at the London Centre for Nanotechnology in Bloomsbury, the studentship will be jointly supervised by Paul Warburton (UCL) and Catherine White (BT). The student will work closely with both Professor Warburton’s research group at LCN and collaborators at BT in Martlesham Heath.
Eligibility
Suitable candidates for this post will have a first class honours undergraduate degree and/or a post-graduate masters qualification in any of the following disciplines: electrical engineering, computer science, mathematics, physics.
NO PRIOR EXPERIENCE OF QUANTUM MECHANICS IS REQUIRED since the D-Wave annealer can be viewed as a “black box” which receives as its input a classical problem and gives as its output a classical solution. Some experience of algorithm development and/or telecoms network engineering would be an advantage but is also not essential.
Applicants must be meet the EPSRC eligibility conditions to be eligible for the award – in summary this typically means that applicants must have no restrictions on their right to live in the UK permanently and have been resident in the UK for three years immediately prior to the studentship commencing. EU Citizens who have not been residing in the UK for the past 3 years may be eligible for a fees only award. Please see EPSRC’s website for further details: https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/skills/students/help/eligibility/
Apply
Interested candidates should contact Prof Warburton ([Email Address Removed]) with a covering letter and a full CV (including contact details for at least two academic referees plus marks/grades achieved on current courses if/as applicable). The covering letter should outline your interest in and suitability for, researching the suggested topic.
Successful candidates will be invited to submit a formal application to UCL.
The closing date for applications is 21 September 2018 and interviews will be held soon after that date. Informal inquiries or further information about the studentship should be e-mailed to [Email Address Removed].u
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