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Microsoft EMEA Scholarship

A Microsoft Research scholarship place is available to study the topic of "Sketching Algorithms for Massive Graphs and Matrices" at the University of Warwick, under the guidance of Professor Graham Cormode and Dr. Milan Vojnovic of Microsoft Research. [Update July 2014: This place has been provisionally filled and we are no longer accepting applications].

The Microsoft PhD Scholarship Programme recognises and supports exceptional students who show the potential to make an outstanding contribution to science and computing. Each Microsoft scholarship consists of an annual bursary for up to a maximum of three years. In addition, every Scholar receives a laptop with a selection of software applications.

During the course of their PhD, Scholars are invited to Microsoft Research in Cambridge for an annual Summer School that includes a series of talks of academic interest and posters sessions, which provides the Scholars the opportunity to present their work to Microsoft researchers and a number of Cambridge academics. Some of the Scholars may also be offered, at the discretion of Microsoft Research, an internship in one of the Microsoft Research laboratories. Internships involve working on a project alongside and as part of a team of Microsoft researchers. Scholars are paid during their internship, in addition to their scholarship bursary.

Applicants require a first-class Honours degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Mathematics or Computer Engineering, experience in programming and aptitude for mathematical subjects. A Masters degree is desirable. Before the Scholarship can be awarded the candidate must also undergo the formal admission procedure to the university, and approval from Microsoft Research.

To apply, please contact Graham Cormode or Milan Vojnovic directly. There is no final deadline, but applications received before the end of May 2014 will have the greatest chance of success. The planned start date would be October 2014, but January 2015 would also be possible.

Project Summary

Increasingly, we are faced with larger and larger volumes of data from which to extract insights and intelligence. An important case surrounds data that can be represented as a graph or (adjacency) matrix. A promising approach is to look for ways to “sketch” such structures: to build a representation that is much more compact than the input, but which allows some function of interest on the original data to be approximated accurately using the sketch. Such sketches are well-known and widely used for data that can be represented as a vector (such as to identify the most frequent elements, or to count the number of distinct items). The goal of this scholarship project is to develop new algorithms for sketching of massive graphs and matrices, and to demonstrate their usefulness via theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation.

Further details and suggested reading is available from Prof. Graham Cormode

Mon 21 Jul 2014, 11:32 | Tags: funding, scholarships