Research School Irregular

Ladies and gentlemen,

 

We are delighted to announce the winners of this year's Outstanding Thesis and Outstanding Paper prizes for PhD students.

 

1. Steve Furber Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in Computer Science (£200):

 

Automated Theorem Proving in Higher-Order Logic by Ahmed Bhayat (supervisor: Giles Reger).

 

Laudatio:

 

Dr. Bhayat's work is part of a new wave of research in higher-order automated reasoning. Back in the 1990s, higher-order superposition -- the technique developed by Dr. Bhayat and independently, in a different variant, by another research group -- was briefly considered by leading researchers such as Christoph Benzmüller and Michael Kohlhase. They essentially dismissed it as impossible due to a technicality. For a further two decades, higher-order automation was pursued by researchers who largely ignored the most successful first-order method (superposition). Dr. Bhayat showed how something "impossible" can be done, both theoretically and practically, and obtained excellent empirical results. Higher-order AR will not be the same after this.

 

2. Carole Goble Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Paper in Computer Science (£150):

 

Li, M., Takamura, H. and Ananiadou, S., A Neural Model for Aggregating Coreference Annotation in Crowdsourcing, in: Proceedings of the 28^th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2020), pages 5760-5773, 2020 Outstanding paper at Coling 2020.

 

Outstanding Paper Prize, runners up (£50):

 

Viktor Schlegel, Goran Nenadic and Riza Batista-Navarro: Semantics Altering Modifications for Evaluating Comprehension in Machine Reading, in Proceedings, Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21).

 

M. Wojtas and K. Chen: Feature importance ranking for deep learning, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (NeurIPS 2020).

 

 

Ian Pratt-Hartmann

Deputy PGR director

Professor Sarah Heath, Associate Dean for Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers will be recommencing Postgraduate Researcher drop in sessions every Friday, 3-4pm, from Friday 30^th April to 30^th July.

 

Here is the zoom invitation link:

Join Zoom Meeting

https://zoom.us/j/95516328715

 

Now, more than ever, it’s really important that we keep the lines of communication open to support you academically and your wellbeing. These sessions are an opportunity to raise any concerns or ask any questions directly with Sarah, who will also be supported by a member of the PGR Services Faculty Team.

 

There is no need to book a specific timeslot, please just access the session using the zoom link

FSE are now accepting applications to the 2021/22 EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship. This year, recruitment to the fellowship will be done in two phases to accommodate students that receive an extension due to COVID-19. The indicative timetable for each phase is as follows:

Phase	Application Deadline	Interviews	Project start date
1	Friday 30th July 2021	August 2021 (exact date TBC)	September 1st 2021 – January 31st 2022
2	Friday 28thJanuary 2022	February 2022 (exact date TBC)	1st April – 31st July 2022

The EPSRC Doctoral Prize is a prestigious scheme aimed at developing the very best EPSRC funded students beyond the end of their PhD and help them launch a successful career in research as potential future research leaders.

Successful applicants will be expected to take their research to the next level and undertake significant new research; the Prize must not be viewed merely as an opportunity to continue/complete PhD work although the continuation of specific work from the applicants’ PhD that will result in publications may be permitted.

Successful applicants will be awarded a tax-free living allowance of £24,370 per annum (pro rata).

For more information please visit: https://www.se.manchester.ac.uk/our-research/funding/