Subject: PhD position at Centre for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh From: Maria Wolters <maria@xxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:43:32 -0500 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>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 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). For further information, please contact Dr Maria Wolters, maria.wolters@xxxxxxxx http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mwolters