Doctoral study in Computer Systems Engineering

Pursuing a PhD at our University gives you access to a high-calibre research community – you may have the opportunity to publish papers, attend international conferences and develop your network in academia and industry.

We welcome research proposals in topics relating to our key areas, including:

• Embedded systems, with emphasis on hardware/software design, real-time systems, low-power design, application-specific processors, system-level languages and compilers, ubiquitous and wearable computing, smart sensors, medical devices, intelligent transportation systems, the Internet of Things, and hardware acceleration of artificial neural networks
• Robotics, focusing on areas such as human-robot interaction, software systems and tools, and applications in essential sectors such as healthcare and agriculture
• Digital health: modelling biological cells, pacemaker testing, and emulating human organs on Field Programmable Gate Arrays
• Ultra high speed computations: advanced techniques for processing high bandwidth datastreams and big data
• Software methodologies: Agile and Lean techniques, data-mining, cloud computing, and scalable machine learning
• Applied Deep Learning, focusing on impaired speech processing and recognition systems, and intelligent health diagnostic and screening systems

Read more about our research expertise

Associate Professor Catherine Watson

Associate Professor Catherine Watson has been working in the field of speech processing for nearly 30 years. Her research focus is speech production in machines and people, with a particular interest in the acoustic phonetics of New Zealand English (NZE) and Te Reo Māori. She also does research in intonation, creating NZE and Te Reo voices for speech synthesis, voice morphing, emotion, speech for robots and visual feedback for speech pronunciation and voice quality. She is interested in both modelling the vocal tract and the glottal source. She had three Marsdens: two on sound change in Te Reo, and one on sound change in NZE.

More researchers in Computer Systems Engineering

• Dr Avinash Malik
• Professor Bruce MacDonald
• Dr Kelly Blincoe
• Dr Kevin Wang
• Dr Morteza Biglari-Abhari
• Dr Nasser Giacaman
• Dr Nitish Patel
• Associate Professor Oliver Sinnen
• Professor Partha Roop
• Associate Professor Waleed Abdulla
• Dr Reza Shahamiri
• Professor Zoran Salcic

• Improving the security of multiprocessor-based embedded system designs | Supervised by Dr Morteza Biglari-Abhari and Professor Zoran Salcic
• The computers have a thousand eyes: Towards a practical and ethical video analytics system for person tracking | Supervised by Dr Morteza Biglari-Abhari and Dr Kevin Wang
• Contributions towards dynamic intelligent software systems​ | Supervised by Professor Zoran Salcic and Dr Kevin Wang
• Context-aware activity recognition for elderly healthcare using wearable sensors embedded in the environment | Professor Zoran Salcic and Dr Kevin Wang
• Timing analysis and design optimization for GALS systems on time-predictable multi-core architectures​ | Supervised by Professor Zoran Salcic, Dr Avinash Malik and Dr Morteza Biglari-Abhari
• Safety analysis of human car following models | Supervised by Professor Partha Roop and Dr Avinash Malik
• Cloud computing with Annotation Parallel Task (@PT) | Supervised by Associate Professor Oliver Sinnen and Dr Nasser Giacaman 
• Optimal task scheduling on parallel systems | Supervised by Associate Professor Oliver Sinnen and Professor Matthias Ehrgot
• Knowledge transformation and reflective practice in two major Agile software development practices | Supervised by Dr Rashina Hoda and Professor Robert Amor
• Programming behaviour of personal service robots with application to healthcare | Supervised by Professor Bruce MacDonald and Professor Elizabeth Broadbent

There are several scholarships you may be eligible for when you decide to pursue your PhD in Computer Systems Engineering, including the University of Auckland Doctoral Scholarships.

For general student enquiries, please contact the Student Hubs.

If you would like to find out more about studying Computer Systems Engineering, you can contact a Postgraduate Adviser.