SICSA Readerships/Lectureships in Informatics

University of Edinburgh
School of Informatics

Lecturer Appointments will be within Grade 8: (£33,779 - £40,335).
Reader Appointments will be within Grade 9: (£42,791 - £48,161).

Vacancy Reference: 3007756

The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh invites applications from candidates of international standing in four areas.

Leading researchers across Scotland, including the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, the Computer Science Departments of the Universities of Glasgow and St Andrews, and others, have recently established the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA). These new posts are part of the School of Informatics' planned expansion within the Alliance.

Reader/Lecturer in Computer Security

As the Internet evolves towards ubiquity, research targets include security and trust, programmability, manageability, and mobility. We seek candidates of international standing in the area of security and trust, relevant to developing the next generation internet. The appointee will have an excellent research record in one or more areas of computer security. Areas of interest include those which match our current strengths, which include: theoretical foundations of security, XML and database security, programming language based security, security properties of mobile and concurrent systems, quantitative analysis of protocols, automated logical analysis of protocol correctness, and security analysis of software APIs and hardware security modules. Applications are also welcomed from those with outstanding research records in complementary backgrounds, for example, cryptography, security policy, or network security.

Reader/Lecturer in Large Scale and Robust Natural Language Processing

Personal ubiquitous interfaces require research enabling multiple, rich communication channels between people and vast bodies of information. We seek candidates of international standing in two areas within large scale, robust natural language processing, relevant to developing new forms of multimodal interaction:

1. The automatic, unsupervised understanding of language in open domains for applications such as machine reading and listening, and human language technologies at the web scale.
2. The development of models and algorithms for terascale processing.

The appointee will extend the current strengths of the School in data-driven approaches to written and spoken language processing and statistical machine learning.

Reader/Lecturer in Modelling/Concurrency

Processing ever-larger volumes of data raises new challenges in the development and use of predictive models of complex systems of interacting elements. We seek candidates of international standing in two areas.

1. Scalable modelling and analysis: the development of large scale modelling techniques, exploiting abstraction, symmetries or other structures, enabling compact, structured data representations, with applications including distributed processing of large data volumes and web services.
2. Concurrency theory: process calculi, automata theory, modal and temporal logics and model-checking and applications of such theories in languages and software tools and verification aspects of web data management.

The appointee will extend the current strengths of the School in foundational, mathematical theories adequate for modelling and reasoning about computational systems and concepts of all kinds.

Reader/Lecturer in Software Engineering

New systems of systems must be engineered to meet the needs of industry and society, operating robustly within an often hostile external environment. We seek candidates of international standing researching and engineering complex software systems. The appointee will have an impressive record of working with complex systems, which might be purely technical or might be socio-technical, either as a professional software engineer or as a researcher in close collaboration with software engineers. Whilst retaining a practical focus, the appointee will be expected to interact with theoretical computer scientists, with the aim of establishing connections between theoretical and engineering work.

Disclosure

These posts are subject to an Enhanced Disclosure Application in line with the Protection of Children (Scotland) Act 2003. Appointment to these posts are conditional on the results of the Disclosure check.

If you wish further information about this matter please refer to:
www.disclosure-scotland.co.uk.

To apply:

We encourage all applicants to apply online. The application process is quick and easy to follow, and you will receive email confirmation of safe receipt of your application. The online system allows you to submit a curriculum vitae.

If you do not have access to a computer, you can call our recruitment line on +44 131 650 2511 for an application pack. This will be posted out to you for you to complete and return.

To complete the application process you need to complete the (i) Application Form, including a statement addressing how your application meets the Person Specification (ii) Additional Personal Information Form, (iii) Equality & Diversity Monitoring Form, and (iv) Rehabilitation of Offenders Form. Please also include a brief research statement and CV. Please return the Application form and all enclosures (except the equal opportunities form) to Eleanor Kerse, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Appleton Tower, 11 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9LE, by the closing date of 20^th August 2007. Return the equal opportunities form in the separate prepaid envelope. We cannot guarantee to consider late applications. Please quote reference no: 3007756

Applications should include a curriculum vitae and research statement, and should reach the School by 20^th August. Candidates shortlisted will be notified by email by 24^th August, and invited to come to Edinburgh for interview on 10^th-11^th September.

Lecturer Appointments will be within Grade 8: (£33,779 - £40,335).
Reader Appointments will be within Grade 9: (£42,791 - £48,161).

UK Lectureship and Readership correspond approximately to US Assistant Professor and Associate Professor, respectively. All candidates should hold a PhD and have demonstrated the ability to publish academically at the highest level. Readership candidates should have proven success at attracting research funding, and leading research within a team.

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Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance

Leading researchers across Scotland, including the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, the Computer Science Departments of the Universities of Glasgow and St Andrews, and others, have recently established the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA). The goal of the Alliance is to sustain and expand Scotland's research excellence in Informatics and Computer Science (ICS), delivering new, globally competitive capabilities, catalysing new collaborations, and exploiting the greater critical mass to promote an international presence. Initial membership includes internationally recognized groups and individuals from ten participating institutions across Scotland.

These institutions have invested significantly in capital projects for ICS and, taken together, have recruited over 30 academic staff in SICSA areas in recent years. A proposal to the Scottish Funding Council for matching funding is currently under consideration. Additional investment will underpin further posts and a Scottish Graduate Academy, and bring together researchers from across Scotland, and distinguished visitors from around the world.

SICSA has four research themes, focussed on tomorrow's systems:

1. Next Generation Internet: As the Internet evolves towards ubiquity, research targets include security and trust, programmability, manageability, and mobility.
2. Multimodal Interaction: Personal ubiquitous interfaces require research enabling multiple, rich communication channels between people and vast bodies of information.
3. Modelling and Abstraction: Processing ever-larger volumes of data raises new challenges in the development and use of predictive models of complex systems of interacting elements.
4. Complex Systems Engineering: New systems of systems must be engineered to meet the needs of industry and society, operating robustly within an often hostile external environment.

The University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh has been instrumental in shaping history for over 400 years. An exciting, vibrant, research led academic community we offer opportunities to work with leading international academics whose visions are shaping tomorrow's world. Our 21 Schools, spread across 3 Colleges, offer over 350 undergraduate and 160 postgraduate courses to more than 20,000 students each year.

As a member of staff, you will not only join one of the world's leading Universities, but also work for one of the top employers in Edinburgh, with over 7000 employees spread across a wide range of academic and supporting roles.

Additional information about the University is available online.

Informatics at Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh views Informatics as a discipline central to a new enlightenment in scholarship and learning, and critical to the future development of science, technology and society. In the age of information, computing technology is changing the ways we work and play. Informatics is changing the way we think.

This vision of informatics as a new science of information---the study, in theory and practice, of natural and artificial systems that store, process and communicate information---was first articulated at Edinburgh in 1997. Informatics at Edinburgh encompasses the study of computational, social, and cognitive systems that acquire, store, process and communicate information. The School of Informatics was founded in 1998, to establish and develop this new discipline. Our strategic development of the area has been based on this clear, but wide-ranging, intellectual agenda.

The School of Informatics is part of the College of Science and Engineering. Informatics covers all aspects of the study of information and computation, in both natural and artificial systems. It embraces a vast range of scientific and engineering endeavour and has enormous intellectual, economic and social impact. The School was created by merger of the former Departments of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science and Computer Science, together with the Human Communication Research Centre and the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute. The School possesses a combination of breadth and strength unparalleled elsewhere in the UK and is one of the leaders in this area, world-wide. Edinburgh is the only university in the UK to have achieved the top 5*A rating in Computer Science in the most recent government Research Assessment Exercise (2001). With 87.1 research-active staff submitted for assessment, it was also the UK's largest research group in this area.

Research in the School is carried out in research Institutes:

• Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation (ANC),
• Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications (CISA),
• Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems (ICCS),
• Institute for Computing Systems Architecture (ICSA),
• Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour (IPAB),
• Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science (LFCS),
• Informatics Life-Sciences Institute (to be launched in 2007).

Each Institute is led by an academic Director, and contains a number of closely related research groups. Institutes act as villages within the wider informatics community. They are responsible for nurturing and promoting research in their areas of expertise: creating a research culture and establishing strategic direction and community of purpose.

The School also supports a fluctuating number (nine in total during the census period) of identified research programmes. These provide recognition and lightweight support (eg funding for seminars or research pump-priming) for interdisciplinary research areas involving researchers in two or more institutes, and advise on strategic direction in identified areas that cut across institute boundaries.

Location

In 2008 the School of Informatics will occupy new purpose-built accommodation to achieve the collocation of Informatics-research, teaching, commercialization and outreach-as an established discipline on a single site, at the heart of the University. The Informatics Forum - 12,000m2 designed for research and interaction, includes accommodation for some 500 researchers, with dedicated visitor space, laboratories for robotics, speech, perception, and hardware prototyping, an Informatics Life-Sciences wing generously supported by the Wolfson Foundation, and inSpace, a 300m2 exhibition space dedicated to public engagement. The Forum is located adjacent to a newly refurbished Appleton Tower, which houses an 1,800m2 centre for Informatics commercialization and technology transfer (supported by Scottish Enterprise), 1,800m2 of specialist teaching accommodation for informatics, 300m2 of dedicated workshops, a 600m2 centre for life-long learning, and five lecture theatres with a combined capacity of 1,200 seats, along with tutorial rooms, and social facilities. The eScience Institute, Centre for Human Cognitive Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology, Linguistics, Law, the Business School, the University Library, and the National Museum are all within 200m, creating a complex that will accommodate a diverse programme of international visitors, workshops, conferences and exhibitions, and outreach, in addition to our ongoing research.

Additional information about the School is available online.

The University reserves the right to vary the candidate information or make no appointment at all. Neither in part, nor in whole does this information form part of any contract between the University and any individual.

Dr. Michael Herrmann

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Michael Herrmann will be joining the School as a Lecturer, in September this year.

J. Michael Herrmann received a Diploma in Mathematics in 1988 and, in 1993, a doctoral degree in Computer Science, both from Leipzig University.

He has held post-doctoral positions at NORDITA, Copenhagen, and at RIKEN's Laboratory for Information Representation in Japan. From 1996 to 2001, he was with the Max-Planck Institute for Fluid Dynamics at Goettingen, Germany. In 2002 he became an assistant professor at Goettingen University.

Dr. Herrmann is currently an associated researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and a principal investigator at the Goettingen Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience.

His research is focused on learning theory in autonomous agents and behavioral neuroscience, machine learning, and dynamics of neural systems.

Migration Coordinator Appointed

Marije ('Mariah', with 'i' pronounced 'a') Vugts, already known to those based at KB, has been appointed to the post of Migration Coordinator. She will work with David Wyse, Joanna Treichel, and a host of others within the School, the University, and the Potterrow Project Team, to ensure an orderly succession of moves from our current distributed state to a new order in the Forum and Appleton Tower.

Marije will be collecting information from various sources over the next few weeks, and I hereby request and require all those whom it may concern to afford her such assistance as may be necessary. Your prompt and full responses to her queries will be much appreciated.

We will hold the traditional Informatics Open Meeting at the end of induction week in September, and plans for migration will be the main topic for discussion.

Dr. Subramanian Ramamoorthy (Ram)

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Subramanian Ramamoorthy will be joining the School as a Lecturer, in September this year.

Ram comes to us from the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin, where he recently obtained his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, under the supervision of Prof. Benjamin Kuipers. Previously, he graduated with an ME degree from the University of Virginia in 1999, and a BE from Bangalore University in 1996.

From 1999 to 2007, Ram was a member of the research and development team at National Instruments Corp. in Austin, Texas, working in the areas of computer vision, motion control and dynamic simulation.

He is primarily interested in the use of intelligent computing and machine learning to solve problems involving complex dynamical systems. He has made contributions to robotics and autonomous agent design. He is also interested in using similar techniques to address questions involving integrative and systems approaches to biology.

Professor Donald Michie 1923.11.11 - 2007.7.7

Professor Donald Michie, 83, and his ex-wife, geneticist Dame Anne McLaren, 80, were killed when their car left the M11 motorway as they travelled from Cambridge to London on Saturday 7th July 2007.

Donald Michie came to Edinburgh in 1958, to join the Department of Surgical Science. He went on to found both the Experimental Programming Unit and the Department of Machine Intelligence at Edinburgh in the 1960s, and was appointed to a Personal Chair in Machine Intelligence in 1967. He left Edinburgh in 1984 to found the Turing Institute in Glasgow.

Anne McLaren also worked in Edinburgh, as member of the Institute of Animal Genetics from 1959 to 1974, when she left to become the Director of the MRC Mammalian Development Unit in London. In 1992, she became a principal research associate at the Welcome Trust/Cancer Research UK.

Many of us were fortunate to hear Donald's illuminating talk, given on 28th June, at the recent Edinburgh Computer History Reunion, and were looking forward to future visits. They will both be sadly missed.