MLSystems Company-linked studentships for entry in September 2026. Some CDT studentships can be funded, or part-funded, by a company or industry partner, to the same level of the standard CDT studentships. They are generally more focused on a specific issue or topic which is of particular interest to the sponsoring company. The PhD project is defined ahead of recruitment, jointly with the company and a university supervisor, and approved at CDT level before being advertised. Industry-funded studentships offer a great opportunity to work closely with a company, often on a more applied research topic, and to benefit from an extended network and enhanced post-PhD career perspectives, whilst being also embedded in an academic environment and cohort-based research and training programme.If you wish to be considered for one of these industry-funded studentships, please follow our application procedure and make sure you complete the relevant section on your first-stage Application Form. Application Process and GuidanceSome industry-funded projects might have a different recruitment timeline from the standard CDT recruitment timeline, if this is the case, this will be clearly stated on the project description. Company-linked projects currently open for applications: LLM-Based AI Companion for Multi-Agent Collaboration This research project sponsored by Tencent aims to provide methodology for interactive AI agents with two forms of interface: a textual based input, and a from-action interface, where the users actions prompt communication.Applications for this project are open with deadline 20 February 2026, 23:59Eligibility: both Home and International students AI Assistants for Video Games This research project sponsored by Tencent aims to provide methodology for interactive AI agents with two forms of interface: a textual based input, and a from-action interface, where the users actions prompt communication.Applications for this project are open with deadline 20 February 2026, 23:59Eligibility: both Home and International students Company-linked projects now closed for applications: Cool Cores: thermal management for next-generation computing systems through a cross-stack approach This research project sponsored by Imec aims to characterize and optimize many-core CPUs for high thermal-density environments.Applications for this project are now closed.Eligibility: both Home and International students Multi-agent simulation and constrained, multi-objective reinforcement learning technologies for install scheduling optimisation problems This research project sponsored by GoFibre aims to develop advanced reinforcement learning algorithms within a multi-agent simulation framework to model real-world conditions, generate high-fidelity reward structures, and optimise scheduling and resource allocation under uncertainty.Applications for this project are now closed.Eligibility: Home students only. Efficient algorithms and implementation for large-scale graph optimisation problems This research project sponsored by Huawei focuses on developing efficient algorithms and implementations for large-scale graph optimisation problems.Two students will be recruited on this project.Applications for this project are now closed.Eligibility: both Home and International students This article was published on 2025-11-04
