[Corpora-List] PhD Studentship in NLP and Cyber Security @ Lancaster University, UK

[Baron, Alistair]

GCHQ funded PhD Studentship at Security Lancaster

Early Detection of Insider Threats by Autonomous Analysis of User Behaviour Evolution

The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has agreed in principle to fund a PhD studentship in the School of Computing and Communications<http://www.scc.lancs.ac.uk> at Lancaster University in the area of Cyber Security and Natural Language Processing. The successful candidate will be a member of Security Lancaster<http://www.security-centre.lancs.ac.uk/>, an EPSRC-GCHQ Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research, internationally recognised and unique in its multi-disciplinary approach.
Project Description:
Insider threats pose a significant challenge to organisations, with serious potential harm related to the loss of intellectual property, significant financial loss and damage to reputation. The research during this studentship will investigate the use of techniques from the field of natural language processing to detect the early indicators of an insider threat within an organisation’s unstructured internal data. Alongside this, new intelligent data analysis techniques will be utilised to process this data to better predict anomalous behaviour and reduce false positives. The research will be required to have an ethics-centred approach, with consideration of subjects’ privacy taken into account. Issues such as the storage of collected data and the resulting analysis will need to be carefully considered, along with an investigation of the consensus view on different levels of automated analysis.
The successful candidate will be jointly supervised by Professor Plamen Angelov, who brings key expertise in intelligent data analysis, machine learning and knowledge extraction; and Dr. Alistair Baron, who has extensive research experience in applying natural language processing and machine learning techniques to cyber security challenges.
Funding and requirements:
The studentship will be funded for 3.5 years, with GCHQ covering the cost of university fees and providing an enhanced annual stipend to the student of £22,000. There will also be a generous travel budget provided to fund attendance at international conferences and other events. The studentship is only open to UK nationals and the successful candidate will have regular visits to GCHQ. Therefore, to be considered for the studentship, candidates must be prepared to undergo GCHQ’s security clearance procedures. More information on the security requirements and vetting procedure can be found at:
http://www.gchq.gov.uk/careers/Documents/nationality_security_reqs.pdf
http://www.gchq.gov.uk/careers/Documents/vetting_process.pdf
The start date for the PhD is negotiable up until September 2015, but is subject to the time taken for security clearance procedures.
We expect the candidates to have at least a strong upper second class honours degree in Computer Science or a closely related discipline and a demonstrable interest and passion for research in cyber security. Prior knowledge of cyber security, natural language processing and machine learning is desirable, but not essential.
Application:
In the first instance, a CV and a one-page cover letter should be emailed to security-studentships at lancaster.ac.uk<mailto:security-studentships at lancaster.ac.uk> to arrive no later than 09:00 AM on the 25th of August 2014.
Shortlisted candidates will be invited to interview. Following interview, the successful candidates will be asked to formally apply to our PhD program and will also need to go through the security clearance process by GCHQ.
Informal enquiries regarding the studentships can also be directed security-studentships at lancaster.ac.uk<mailto:security-studentships at lancaster.ac.uk>.

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Dr. Alistair Baron
Faculty Research Fellow
Security Lancaster
School of Computing and Communications
Infolab21
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4WA
UK

O: B61 Infolab21
T: +44 (0)1524 510037
E: a.baron at lancs.ac.uk<mailto:a.baron at lancs.ac.uk>
W: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~barona

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