Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment

Oxford Brookes University – PhD Studentship

The Department of Computing and Communications Technologies at Oxford Brookes University is pleased to offer a three year full-time PhD Studentship to a new student commencing in June 2014. The successful applicant will receive an annual bursary of �10,000 for three years (with no inflation increase) and the fees will be paid by the Universty.

The successful candidate will work within the Artificial Intelligence and Vision group of the Department of Computing and Communication Technologies, under the supervision of Dr Fabio Cuzzolin.

Topic of research: Uncertainty in Computer Vision

Decision making and estimation are central in most applied sciences, as the need often arises to make inferences about the state of the external world, based on information which is at best limited, if not downright misleading. Uncertainty can be dealt with in a number of ways. Generative probabilistic graphical models, which describe how the data are generated via classical distribution functions, are most used for complex, multi-person activity recognition. Discriminative models which do not attempt to model data generation, but focus on learning how to discriminate between data belonging to different categories or classes, are dominant in action and gesture recognition, in which we aim at recognising human actions based on a limited training set of examples, captured via conventional or range cameras. Imprecise-probabilistic models which assume the data is probabilistic but insufficient to estimate a precise probability distribution, have been successfully employed in example-based human pose estimation. Depending on the problem we need to tackle, we might need to consider metric learning techniques for generative models, latent SVM part-based discriminative approaches, or a meaningful integration of the two.

The successful candidate will work on both the theoretical development and the application of these techniques to scenarios such as the interaction with a humanoid robot able to recognise and mimic natural human gesturing, the retrieval of videos from internet repositories such as YouTube, the monitoring of the health of people affected by brain conditions in their own homes, via range sensors such as Kinect.

For further information about the Artificial Intelligence research group, consult

http://cct.brookes.ac.uk/research/isec/artificial-intelligence/index.html

or Dr Fabio Cuzzolin’s web page:

http://cms.brookes.ac.uk/staff/FabioCuzzolin/

The selection criteria will focus on academic excellence, suitability of the research environment for your project and references.

If you would like to apply you should submit an application for a place on the PhD programme at Oxford Brookes University through UKPASS (http://www.ukpass.ac.uk).   As part of the application you must also submit a full research proposal (instructions on how to prepare a research proposal can be found on the Brookes website: http://cct.brookes.ac.uk/research/proposals.html) together with a supporting statement of no more than 500 words summarising:

• Your reasons for undertaking this project;
• Preparation undertaken and previous research experience;
• The ways in which this bursary will make a difference to your research.

Please apply through UKPass and submit all of the following supporting documents separately to Helen Tanner - htanner@brookes.ac.uk - by 12noon on 28 February 2014.

• Full research proposal
• Copy of Passport (if applicable)
• IELTS Certificate or equivalent (if applicable)
• Two academic references
• Degree Certificate(s)
• Transcript(s)

Please be advised that the selection process may involve an interview, and the successful candidate would be expected to commence in the research degree programme in June 2014.