Monthly Archives: February 2013

8 Funded Doctoral Studentships in Cyber Security

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As the technologies of cyberspace come to inhabit all parts of everyday life, Cyber Security has become everyone’s problem.  We face a growing collection of adversaries who are agile, opportunistic, and increasingly strategic, developing an ecosystem of suppliers involved in delivering elements of attack capability. They seek to defraud consumers, exploit their trust, or invade their privacy; to misappropriate corporate secrets and intellectual property; to disrupt the operation of the state or critical infrastructure.

Holding one of these studentships will allow you to study the problems and opportunities in Cyber Security from many different disciplinary perspectives, to understand the real-world challenges, and to make a contribution to solving some of the most significant problems society faces today.

Applications will be considered from those with undergraduate and master’s qualifications in a wide range of disciplines: Cyber Security raises research challenges which span computing and social sciences, as well as associated academic areas.

Funding is provided by EPSRC according to usual eligibility rules.   For more details, to ask questions, or to learn how to apply, please contact Maureen York (maureen.york@cs.ox.ac.uk)  as soon as possible.

Marie Curie Info and Proposal Writing Events

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Registration is now open for the Marie Curie Individual Fellowships and Career Integration Grants General Information and Proposal Writing event, organised by the Marie Curie UK National Contact Point.

There will be three separate events, which will take place at the following locations:

  • University College London, 17 April 2013
  • Durham University (part of a NE Regional event) 8 May 2013
  • Queen’s University, Belfast, 13 May 2013

Time:
Registration for each event will start at 9:30. The events will start at 10:00 and close at around 13:00.

Aim:
The aim of the session is to provide participants with an overview of the Marie Curie Individual Fellowships (Intra-European Fellowships (IEF), International Outgoing Fellowships (IOF), and International Incoming Fellowships (IIF)) and the Career Integration Grants (CIG). These sessions will also provide those wishing to submit an application with a deeper understanding of the proposal format and the key issues they are required to address in planning and writing their proposal.

Who should attend:
The sessions will be of particular interest to UK-based researchers who are interested in and/or are planning to submit a proposal to the Marie Curie Individual Fellowships’ calls, which open on 14 March and close on 14 August, or the second cut-off date for the Career Integration Grants on the 18 September.

The session will include a presentation on the schemes, which are the last calls under FP7. It is also hoped that the session will provide a forum for discussion, and to answer questions that applicants may have relating to these schemes and preparing a proposal.

Programme outline:
Each session will provide an outline of the Marie Curie Actions, specific details on the fellowships and grants action and the application form and guidance on planning and writing your Marie Curie proposal. There will be the opportunity to ask questions throughout the sessions. The agenda and venue for each session will be available closer to the time of the event, and will also be sent to registered participants via email.

Additional Information
  • To register, please fill in the online registration form available from the Marie Curie NCP website. Places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
  • Those wishing to register for the NE Regional event at Durham University should register by email to: research.grants@durham.ac.uk

Advice from Leverhulme Trust Director, Gordon Marshall

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Leverhulme-Trust1

I’ve come across an interesting blog post, from the University of Lincoln, that may well be of interest.

The post features some advice and insight  from Gordon Marshall, the Director of Leverhulme Trust.

 

“Because we are not a research council and this is not public money, so we do not need to be constrained by caution… Something can be a very exciting, very promising, high-quality, [a] cohesive programme with a clear vision behind it, but very high-risk. Some funding agencies would have to back off at that point, but since the board is only answerable to itself for the outcomes, it can afford to take the risk,”

Rather than repeating it all here, I would definitely recommend heading over to the Lincoln blog, where it also includes details on how the Trust works, their Programme Grants and the selection process.

Workshop: Can you change the world through university communications?

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University staff are invited to attend this forthcoming workshop: Can you change the world through university communications? Approaches to turning your work into funding and impact

12.30-1.30pm Wednesday 20 March

Rob McNeil, Senior Manager at the Migration Observatory, will discuss effective ways to use communications tools to deliver change, using examples from his work here at Oxford, and from NGOs in the UK and America.This discussion will look at the planning, development, delivery and evaluation processes for several projects and consider what made them succeed or not, and how to apply those lessons more broadly in the academic context.

Please book here

CDE Themed Call – The Challenges of Countering Terrorist Network

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The Challenges of Countering Terrorist Networks
http://www.science.mod.uk/events/event_detail.aspx?eventid=202

 The effects of terrorism can have a significant impact on the UK. Identifying terrorist activity and understanding the associated network is key to countering any impact a network may exert.

This CDE themed call presents the following three S&T challenges:

  1. Understanding networks – we need effective methods to explore the potentially large volume of data available from a variety of sources, across a range of data formats (eg audio, visual, text) to help identify the key activities and individuals that form any network.
  2. Identifying individuals – we are looking for novel techniques that uniquely identify an individual, be those biometric or repeatable behaviours (eg within the digital domain). Priorities in this area include reducing the size, weight and power requirements of current forensic technology, moving to near real-time processing and the potential of remote operation without reaching back to large databases.
  3. Translating information – we need to extract information from different sources which may be in a wide range of different languages. In particular, we need to be able to rapidly prioritise sources of information (audio, paper and electronic) to enable human interpreters to focus only on key information sources for full translation.

There is a launch event taking place in Reading, on 19 March, which I would recommend attending if you are considering applying.

  •  Internal deadline: Tuesday 24 April 2013 1200
  • Official deadline: Wednesday 1 May 2013 1700

Please let me know if any of you are interested in applying.