Each student will undertake a significant, challenging and original research project, leading to the award of a PhD (at Imperial) or a DPhil (at Oxford). Given the breadth and depth of the research teams at Imperial College and at the University of Oxford, the proposed projects will range from theoretical to computational and applied aspects of statistics and machine learning, with a large number of projects involving strong methodological/theoretical developments together with a challenging real problem. A significant number of projects will be co-supervised with industry.
The students will pursue 2 mini-projects during their first year, with the expectation that one of them will lead to their main research project.
The process for students and projects to be matched up will be as follows. At the admission stage, students will choose one individual mini-project. These mini-projects are proposed by our supervisory pool and our industrial partners. Students will be based at the home institution of the main supervisor of the first mini-project.
During their first 3 months in the CDT, students will be working on this mini-project. During months 4-6 of their PhD, students will be working on a second mini-project. For students whose studentship is funded or co-funded by an external partner, the second mini-project will be with the same external partner – but it will explore a different question. Each mini-project will be assessed, on the basis of a report written by the student, by researchers from Imperial and Oxford. The students will then begin their main PhD/DPhil project, which can be based on one of the two mini-projects.