Two PhD Scholarships in Freshwater Ecology at the University of Canterbury

(a) Flow variation and threatened galaxiid fishes, and
(b) influence of urbanisation on stream invertebrate populations.

Two fully funded PhD studentships are available within the Freshwater Ecology Research Group, School of Biological Sciences, University of Canterbury for freshwater ecology research. This is a chance for high calibre students to join a successful research team investigating a wide variety of issues in freshwater ecosystems.

We are looking for students who can undertake innovative research that will both improve understanding of fundamental issues and enhance current management. There is an opportunity for students to develop their own research ideas as long as they fit within the overall focus of the research group. However, we would especially like to hear from students who wish to work on either (a) the effects of flow variation on the ecology of threatened galaxiid fishes or (b) the influence of urbanisation on stream invertebrate populations.

Applicants need to have the potential to carry out innovative and insightful research, as well as the initiative and personality to communicate the results to a wide variety of groups. They must be able to work within a team and can expect high quality mentoring and support from the group. Successful applicants will have a strong academic record, appropriate practical and technical experience, and will have demonstrated a high level of ability in written and oral communication.

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Doctoral Scholarship at Victoria University: The Discourse of Negotiation in Professional Workplace Contexts

The role of effective workplace communication skills for achieving transactional objectives can be considered fundamental to workplace success for most organisations.

While important in all aspects of workplace interaction, these skills are crucial in the negotiation of complex and potentially conflictual agreements which potentially carry far-reaching consequences (Norisada 2007, Prego-Vazquez 2007, Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004, Locher 2004).

The negotiation process is a communicative endeavour with discourse as the tool by which participants achieve (or fail to achieve) their intended outcomes. A detailed analysis of discourse in social interaction can thus throw valuable light on the range of strategies which may contribute to resolving disputes and disagreements in problematic and challenging negotiations.

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Genetic Programming and Evolutionary Computing research group

Background
The Genetic Programming and Evolutionary Computing research group at Victoria University of Wellington was recently awarded a large research grant in Genetic Programming (GP) for data mining tasks by the Marsden Fund of New Zealand (similar to the National Science Foundation in USA). We are looking for a good PhD student in this field. The grant will provide full funding for the student to cover the tuition fees, living allowance, and travel cost.

The Project
Data mining tasks arise in a wide variety of practical situations, ranging from classification to regression, clustering, and optimization tasks. Since the 1990s, genetic programming (GP) has become a promising approach to building reliable data mining models quickly and automatically. GP uses ideas analogous to biological evolution to search the space of possible models to evolve a good solution for a particular task. GP has been applied to many data mining tasks and achieved some success. However, there are still limitations in program structures, representations, genetic operators, search algorithms and theoretical foundations in GP that restrict GP for difficult data mining tasks.

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