PhD Studies

PhD research form a core part of our research programme and we are keen to attract high-calibre students with a passion for thinking. If you are considering embarking on a PhD why not come along for a visit, discuss your ideas and find out what it's like to study in the Centre? Please contact Stephanie Wilson, steph@soi.city.ac.uk, for an informal discussion.

Our research takes a multi-disciplinary approach covering three broad areas: usability, accessibility and requirements engineering.

The School of Informatics website provides additional information on how to apply. Please visit the PhD/Research Studies page.

Prof Neil Maiden is especially interested in supervising multi-disciplinary research in systems and software engineering, with particular interests in:

• All aspects of requirements engineering, including acquiring requirements, creative thinking about requirements, requirements modelling, requirements negotiation and requirements for services delivered from web-systems and off-the-shelf packages.

• Innovative processes and techniques for socio-technical system design.

• New theories, processes and models for concurrent requirements and architecture modelling.

• Scenario-based systems development.

• Theories and models of creativity in software design.

• New theories, processes and models for developing systems from packages, components and web-services.

Stephanie Wilson is interested in supervising research in the area of human-computer interaction. In particular:

• Theories, models and empirical studies of collaborative work, especially in the healthcare or learning domains.

• Technology enhanced learning: usability of learning support technologies, social networking tools and online communities for learning.

• Usability evaluation: investigating and enhancing effectiveness of techniques, comparative studies, development of new evaluation paradigms for specific application areas.

Dr Sara Jones is interested in supervising research relating to the role of creativity in the design and development of software-intensive systems. This research could be conducted according to the traditions of either human-computer interaction or software engineering, and could focus, in particular, on:

• Tools and techniques for stimulating creative inputs into the software development process

• Processes and tools supporting the exploitation of creative results in the context of software development

• Theoretical perspectives on the role of creativity in software design and development

Dr George Buchanan is particularly interested in researching how people interact with information, especially:

• Mobile search and browsing technologies

• Improving user interaction with digital documents

• Bridging between physical and digital information

• Assisting users make effective decisions about the quality of documents

Dr Simone Stumpf is interested in supervising research about how people interact with intelligent system and intelligent user interfaces, focusing on:

• Explanations of intelligent system behaviour and reasoning

• End-user Programming of intelligent systems, especially Programming-by-demonstration and Programming-by-Example

• Intelligent web mashups

• Personal Information Management supported by intelligent approaches