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.

Data mining tasks arise in a wide variety of practical situations, ranging from classification to regression, clustering, and optimisation 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.


Applicants are invited from excellent and enthusiastic students wishing to undertake a PhD in this area. The successful applicant will extend the current research and address the methodological/theoretical issues in GP and/or a real-world engineering applications in data mining using GP and related evolutionary learning techniques.

Applications from both domestic and international students are invited. A strong background in C/C++/Java programming and a basic background in machine learning and pattern recognition are required. A good background in genetic programming, evolutionary computing, neural networks, statistics, or statistics/operations research is desired. Students should have a first class Honour or a Masters degree in computer science.

Closing date: 1 May 2009