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3.5 year PhD studentship in multimodal interaction, University of Edinburgh



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