PhD Studentships in Data-informed Audience-centric Media Engineering
| Applications Close: 15 July 2020 Start date: January 2021 Research group: Data-informed Audience-centric Media Engineering (DAME) |
Duration: 4 years |
Applications are invited for 3 fully-funded international PhD Studentships starting in January 2021 to undertake research as part of a new Centre of Doctoral Training in the area of Data-informed Audience-centric Media Engineering (DAME) alongside support from the BBC, as our key industry partner.
The vision for DAME is to produce world-class PhD researchers in technologies that support future products and services in online media. To maximise impact, we encourage a broad interpretation of both “audience” and “media”. DAME is, therefore, seeking diverse and motivated candidates to conduct research into topics such as Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Social Computing, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Machine Listening, Multimedia Content Delivery and Robotics. You will be expected to make fundamental contributions to these research fields but, importantly, each student will also have an interdisciplinary and applied focus in the area of audience-centricity. Our research remit includes:
• Enhancing the understanding of content consumption and audience interaction
• Enhancing audience experience, e.g. via multi-sensory experiences
• Protecting audiences from online harms (e.g. within social media and video sharing platforms)
• Understanding and enhancing news content platforms
• Enhancing audience safety and automatic content moderation
• Automatic content summarisation, annotation and metadata generation
• Building content recommendation and discovery approaches
• Understand social media audiences and their relationships with the wider websphere
• Integrating physical and digital audience experiences
• Understanding interaction on online social platforms
• Enabling virtual/augmented reality, including haptic sensing and actuation, soft robotics
• Supporting user-generated content and citizen broadcasting
• Measuring the longitudinal impact of content on culture, society and economies
• Enabling and understanding data and citizen journalism
• Understanding and optimising content production
• Intelligent curation of archival material to create custom educational material
Applicants are invited to submit their own project proposals for research ideas that fall within the above remit of DAME. However, we also have a number of targeted project titles that candidates can apply for, as proposed by potential supervisors. For details of these project titles, candidates should visit this webpage: http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~tysong/DAME/
We encourage candidates to discuss projects with their prospective supervisor before submitting an application. A full list of our academics can be found here: http://eecs.qmul.ac.uk/people/ Candidates should clearly state the title of their preferred project(s) and supervisor(s) in the application pack. Candidates may list up to 3x project titles of interest.
DAME offers a four-year training programme, where students will carry out their PhD, supported by taught specialist modules, industrial placements, and skills training. The PhD student will be based in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science (www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk) and will be a member of one of our eleven internationally acclaimed research groups (http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/research/). Students will also be given the opportunity to interact with the cross-faculty Institute of Applied Data Science (https://www.applieddatascience.qmul.ac.uk/).
Candidates should have a first-class honours degree or equivalent, or a good MSc Degree, in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics or Mathematics. This studentship is available to candidates of all nationalities and will cover student fees and a tax-free stipend starting at £17,285 per annum for 4 years.
To apply, please follow the online process (https://www.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/howtoapply/) by selecting ‘Electronic Engineering’ in the ‘A-Z list of research opportunities’ and following the instructions on the right-hand side of the web page. You should state clearly that you are applying for the DAME studentship.
Please note: we request a ‘Statement of Research Interests’. Your statement should answer: (i) Why are you interested in the topic of your PhD proposal? (ii) What relevant experience do you have? and (iii) a research proposal describing the topic(s) you would like to focus on. If you are applying for one of the specific project titles above, you may list up to three projects in prioritised order. Your statement should be brief: no more than 750 words or one side of A4 paper. In addition, we would also like you to send a sample of your written work. This might be a chapter of your final year dissertation, or a published conference or journal paper. More details can be found at: http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/phd/apply.php
Informal enquiries can be made by email to Dr Gareth Tyson (g.tyson@qmul.ac.uk) or Dr Charalampos Saitis (c.saitis@qmul.ac.uk).
The closing date for the applications is 15 July 2020
Interviews are expected to take place in August 2020
The anticipated start date is January 2021
We will also welcome self-funded applications throughout the year.