Why would you do a PhD at the ACPS Research Group?

We have job openings for scientific employee positions from time to time, which are suitable for doing a PhD while having the position. The task that you have when holding such positions include performing research on the topics on the group and helping with teaching of courses taught by the other members of the group. The research performed in this context is the one that will later get you your PhD degree, and the head of the group takes care that the concrete research work done is suitable for getting a PhD later in case of sufficient results.

There are a good number of reasons to apply for an open position:

• In the research group, we take care that the various obligations that come with a scientific employee position do not become too exhessive to prevent you from making progress with your research.
• We have plenty of national and international contacts to make research visits of other research groups and similar activities possible.
• We work on publications for high-quality venues that are suitable for preparing academic as well as industrial carrers.
• Our work combines theory and practice; it is not only foundational, but applied at the same time, as we implement our approaches in prototype tools and apply them to case studies.
• * Out work is very diverse. It spans automata theory as well as machine learning, embedded systems monitoring, and hardware aspects of embedded systems. There are many questions in the field spanned by these topical anchors, and there is surely something for you as well!

To enable you to succeed in this context, you should have acquired some needed skills during your past studies (or before that):

• The ability to introduce yourself to new areas of research by reading a suitable textbook. We import concepts and algorithms from adjacent domains of research into our own work. Normally, there are no courses available on the respective topic at TU Clausthal, so we (have to) resort to primary and secondary literature here.
• You should not be afraid of formal notation. For the eventual publication of ideas at reputable international venues, they need to be clearly expressed. Normally, this involves using formal notation to bring the point across. Ideally, you did not acquire a habit of skipping the formal parts when reading texts in the past and you should be willing to work on using formal notation to improve your writing skills.
• The ability to think about computational problems and make observations on previous approaches to tackling a problem. This may involve observing the strengths and weaknesses of existing tools/implementations, as well as thinking about an algorithmic solution to a problem by analyzing its main ideas.

To exemplify how we combine theory and practice in our research group, consider the following projects that have been performed by members of the group: