[DL] PhD Scholarship: Logic for Multiscale Network Modelling

[John Stell]

Applications are invited for a PhD Scholarship
at The University of Leeds, School of Computing
on Logic for Multiscale Network Modelling.

Students from UK, European Union, and Internationally
are all eligible.
Deadline for applications: 17th June 2016

Overall up to six PhD Scholarships will be awarded
for projects from the list of topics at

http://engineering.leeds.ac.uk/research-opportunity/201323/research-degrees
/614/funded-studentships-in-the-school-of-computing-

The Logic for Multiscale Network Modelling project would be supervised
by Dr John Stell (j.g.stell at leeds.ac.uk)

Computing with data in the form of networks is important for many
purposes. Examples include: social networks modelling relationships
between people; road networks for navigation; biological networks
describing processes of interaction; networks of connections between
concepts in ontologies for knowledge representation in artificial
intelligence. In these and other areas networks are needed at multiple
scales. Multiscale networks can arise from the need to model different
processes at different levels of detail as well as from the need to 'zoom
out' from large volumes of data to visualise overall patterns.

This PhD project will develop mathematical foundations for modelling
multiscale networks to provide logical tools for reasoning about knowledge
at diverse scales. The project builds on recent research which has
resulted in a novel modal logic based on relations between graphs and,
more generally, hypergraphs. These relations model similarities between
elements (links and nodes) of a network. When moving to a less detailed
level different but similar elements can collapse to a single element.
Work in the PhD will include establishing algebraic properties of these
relations, applying them  in logics for reasoning about levels of detail,
and evaluating the resulting techniques  with respect to network data.