3.5 year PhD studentship in multimodal interaction, University of Edinburgh

[Maria Wolters <maria@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Multimodal Reminders in the Home

3.5 year PhD studentship
at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

The project will investigate the effects of ageing and hearing loss on  
the usability and intelligibility of auditory reminders in the home  
environment. Speech and non-speech audio reminders will be compared  
systematically under a variety of realistic conditions. Experiments  
will be based on a dual-task paradigm, where participants perform a  
distractor task while attending to and/or acting on auditory reminders.

The project is a collaboration with the Department of Computer  
Science, Glasgow (Prof. Brewster, Dr. McGee-Lennon), and the  
Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Queen Margaret University  
(Pauline Campbell, Christine DePlacido). The successful candidate will  
be working closely with a PhD candidate at Glasgow who will be  
specialising in multimodal reminders, in particular tactile and  
olfactory reminders. Both candidates will collaborate on a pilot  
reminder system that will be trialled in users' homes.

This project would suit candidates from a variety of backgrounds,  
including human-computer interaction, speech science, audiology,  
medical physics, rehabilitation engineering, ergonomics, phonetics, or  
cognitive psychology.

All applicants should have completed their first degree before taking  
up the post. Applicants should have at least basic programming skills  
(at least one of Java, C++, Python). Skills in experimental design and  
statistics are highly desirable. Familiarity with software such as  
SPSS, matlab, or R is a bonus. Applicants should also be open to  
qualitative approaches to research.

The position is fully funded for 3.5 years through a stipend from the  
UK Engineering Physical Sciences and Research Council. The stipend is  
currently around £12900 per annum. In addition, fees for UK and  
European students are covered.

The School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, came top in the  
last UK Research Assessment Exercise. The School offers a wide range  
of support and courses for post-graduate students.
For further information about the Informatics PhD programme, see
http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/phd.html
For further information about the Centre for Speech Technology  
Reseach, Edinburgh, see
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk
For more information about the Multimodal Interaction Group, Glasgow, see
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~stephen/
For more information about Speech and Hearing Sciences , QMU, see
http://www.qmu.ac.uk/sls

The successful candidate will start on October 1, 2009. Provisionally,  
the supervisors
will be Prof Steve Renals, Dr Maria Wolters, and Dr Marilyn  
McGee-Lennon (Glasgow).

The deadline for receiving applications is July 31, 2009.
More information about the application process can be found here:
http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/apply.html

For further information, please contact

Dr Maria Wolters, maria.wolters@xxxxxxxx
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mwolters