Logic (PhD) – (Ph.D.)

Contents

In the MSc Logic, every student must do research projects of at least 6 EC in total in order to graduate. In these projects students get prepared for the more intensive research work of the MSc thesis. They also guarantee that each graduate will have worked in at least two different areas.

Each January and June, we are offering coordinated projects. These projects will be announced on this webpage about a month before the project period and will be presented by the project instructors in a meeting a few weeks before the start of the project period.

In addition to that, students can do individual projects: they can approach a potential supervisor (a senior member of staff, a postdoc, a PhD student, or an academic visitor at the ILLC) and ask whether they can do a project or reading course with him or her. Individual projects can be done at any time (not necessarily in January or June).

Coordinated Projects in June 2012

* Justification Logic (B. Renne, 6 EC)
* Negative Polarity Items of the Much Class (S. Solt, 6 EC)
* The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming (J. van Eijck, 6 EC)

Presentations: The instructors will introduce their projects during a meeting on Tuesday, 24 April 2012 at 17:00 (sharp) in room A1.04.

Deadline: To take one of these projects, you need to register with the instructor in question no later than Monday, 21 May 2012.

Schedule: The project period is 4-29 June 2012. Contact your instructor for full details.

Individual Projects

The ILLC staff members are often willing to do research projects with individual students.The initiative lies with the student. Please inform your academic mentor as well as the programme director if such a project will be undertaken. The standard amount of credits also for an indivudual project is 6 EC, which equals 168 hours of work. If the staff member wants to deviate from this amount of credits, he or she should argue this with the programme director.

Academic Calendar

At the UvA, the academic year splits into two semesters of three periods each. Periods a and b of each semester are "lecture periods", period c is a "project period". Lecture periods are seven weeks of classes plus an exam week, project periods are four weeks. Students are supposed to do research projects, work on term papers or participate in special events in period c.

The Credit System

The Graduate Programme in Logic follows the ECTS, the European Credit Transfer System. 30 ECTS credits per semester is considered to be a normal course load. This is equivalent to about 40 hours per week and include lectures, reading, assignments, library queries, and discussions. Talented, ambitious students may manage 40 ECTS per semester.

The conversion rate between old UvA study points and ECTS credits is 1.4:1, i.e., 10 ECTS credits are equal to 7 old UvA study points. One US semester credit is 2 ECTS credits.

Faculty

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) is a research institute of the University of Amsterdam, in which researchers from the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities collaborate.

ILLC's central research area is the study of fundamental principles of encoding, transmission and comprehension of information. Emphasis is on natural and formal languages, but other information carriers, such as images and music, are studied as well.

Research at ILLC is interdisciplinary, and aims at bringing together insights from various disciplines concerned with information and information processing, such as logic, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and philosophy.