We are now accepting applications for 3-year PhD studentship on a project called "Probabilistic property-based testing" in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jcheney/group/ppbt.html The aim of the project is to explore the hypothesis that property-based testing (e.g. QuickCheck) is a form of probabilistic programming. Property-based testing is a widely used and powerful form of lightweight randomized testing, but it has been developed largely independently of increasingly sophisticated probabilistic programming languages and inference algorithms. This project will study the consequences of adopting the perspective that property-based testing is a form of probabilistic programming, and investigate subproblems such as inducing good properties from programs or test data; testing complex programs using advanced sampling techniques that provide error bounds; and synthesizing suitable data generators or automatically providing concise explanations why a property fails to hold. Possible application areas include randomized testing of programming language designs and type systems themselves (following e.g. PLT Redex or logic programming-based approaches to language specification), as well as traditional system specification and testing problems. The studentship is tenable for 3 years, for a student of any nationality, and includes a stipend of £14,777 per year (tax free and increasing with inflation), supported by Huawei. The School is also partnered with data science and AI centres of excellence such as The Alan Turing Institute in London and the Bayes center in Edinburgh, and there will be ample opportunities to engage with these institutes, via workshops and other schemes. The ideal candidate would have a strong background in functional or logic programming (e.g. Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, Prolog), or a strong background in machine learning. Candidates already familiar with probabilistic programming or symbolic machine learning (e.g. relational learning, probabilistic logic programming) are especially welcome. Applications from prospective students interested in starting a PhD in the next academic year should be submitted by March 18, 2019 at the latest. Applications received by January 31, 2019 will receive full consideration; after that date applications will be considered until the position is filled. The anticipated start date is September 2019 but earlier start dates may be possible. To apply, please submit an application to the 3-year CISA PhD programme: https://www.star.euclid.ed.ac.uk/public/urd/sits.urd/run/siw_ipp_lgn.login?p... Further instructions and information about PhD study at CISA and the University of Edinburgh is available here: http://web.inf.ed.ac.uk/cisa/study-with-us https://www.ed.ac.uk/informatics/postgraduate/apply For more information please contact Vaishak Belle (vaishak@ed.ac.uk) and/or James Cheney (jcheney@inf.ed.ac.uk).