PhD positions in Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK)

Strathclyde is @th_koeln partner university in the UTOPIAE project.
The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering of Strathclyde University (Glasgow, UK) is looking for a PhD candidate to work on a research topic focused on fuzzy rule based system for aerospace engineering design. 
Project Aims and Objective
Modern technology is pervasive in all the aspects of our life by providing users, on a daily basis, with recommendations on the execution of various tasks, harvesting the corresponding information from the use of cloud resources and automated systems. Computational intelligence techniques have reached such a level of maturity that also the engineering world is shifting from model centred engineering design to the exploitation of artificial intelligence techniques and large datasets for knowledge discovery. The proposed research is intended as a first step towards a more ambitious project of developing a multidisciplinary Design Engineering Assistant (DEA). By making use of data mining techniques, fuzzy rule and large datasets, the DEA, will provide support to the engineer for quick assessment studies, and running on the background will provide real time feedbacks to the actions taken by the designer. The intelligent agent is not intended to substitute the human in the design process but rather to enhance his perception of the problem and solutions through the quickly evaluations of different alternatives. For this reason, the applicability of fuzzy set theory, that is the natural model to represent human expert knowledge, is investigated in the proposed research study. The development of the theory behind fuzzy logic stems from the consideration that the way of reasoning of the human mind in fuzzy terms is of great efficiency and advantage. The amount of information processed by the human brain in a fraction of time is extraordinary if compared to the actual performance of our most modern machines. This is because the human mind has the ability of rapidly discarding most of the information irrelevant to the task, based on a fuzzy reasoning. Fuzzy rule-based systems (FRBSs) have been developed based on this concept and they became well known techniques in the field of soft computing and successfully applied to the design of control systems. These kind of computational intelligence techniques are tolerant of imprecision, uncertainty, partial truth, and approximation. Rules can be derived from human experts through the construction of knowledge engineering databases. This is however a very lengthy process that requires man power to perform interviews, collect and order data. The proposed research is aiming at automatically inferring this knowledge from existing datasets of components and/or mission studies by applying clustering and more advanced machine learning techniques to create rules.
Qualifications: Master degree in computer science, applied mathematics, statistics or aerospace engineering.
Experience: Experience in the field of uncertainty quantification, optimisation and/or machine learning techniques is desirable
Starting date: September/October 2017.
Student eligibility: UK and EU students.
Contact: Annalisa Riccardi (name.surname@strath.ac.uk)