Position: PhD (CASE) Studentship in multimedia signal processing (3 years)
Location: London, UK 
Title: Audiovisual semantic discovery

Applications are invited for a CASE PhD studentship with the Digital Signal Processing and Multimedia Research Group of the Electronic Engineering Department, Queen Mary, University of London in collaboration with BT Group CTO Research and Venturing.

Project description:
One of the goals of dynamic scene analysis and understanding is to find unusual patterns (events, interactions) in large collections of audiovisual material. Unusual patterns may be rare events or specific interactions. Rare events and interactions are not necessarily easy to model or to predict. The aim of this PhD research project is to address the scene understanding problem by exploring the use of unsupervised dimensionality reduction by isometric mapping and machine learning. Isometric mapping aims at finding meaningful low-dimensional structures, representing patterns, events and interactions, hidden in their high-dimensional observations. The features to be used will be based on both visual and acoustic information. Acoustic information allows one to disambiguate between events that would appear similar based on visual information only. Furthermore, additional information will be provided by the use of data captured by multiple sensors in order to discover events on a larger scale than that enabled by the use of one sensor only. The isometric mapping will generate the embedding of the data under analysis that in turn will enable the discovering of spatio-temporal structures corresponding to meaningful events. Data clustering will be used to separate different events and to detect abnormal events. In addition to the above, given the nature of the application, privacy issues will be considered for data collection and visualisation. The objective is to ensure that the proposed system is accepted by the end users and the general public.

Workplace:
The normal place of work will be Queen Mary, University of London, but the candidate will have the opportunity to spend some periods, distributed over the project life and totalling a minimum of 3 months, within BT. The successful candidate will join an expanding research group engaged in a variety of national and international projects on digital media and content technologies.
Queen Mary, University of London is situated in Mile End, bordering Regents Canal, close to Canary Wharf (the new, modern and commercial part of London) and to the City of London ( http://www.qmul.ac.uk  ).

Eligibility:
The studentship is open to UK and EU students only.
For UK residents it covers the cost of home student tuition fees as well as a tax-free EPSRC maintenance stipend ( http://www.epsrc.ac.uk ). For EU students it only covers the cost of tuition fees and does not include a maintenance stipend. In addition, for both UK and EU students, a stipend contribution of GBP 3,000 per annum will be made by the CASE sponsor.
Applicants must have a first degree in mathematical science, physics, statistics, computer science, electronic engineering or allied disciplines (minimum 2:1 or equivalent), and excellent mathematical and programming skills. Previous experience of digital signal processing or computer vision is desirable, although not mandatory.

Application: Applicants should follow the guidelines that can be found at  http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/study/phd/res-stud.htm

Fon informal enquiries and deadline: contact Dr Andrea Cavallaro ( andrea.cavallaro@elec.qmul.ac.uk )

Links:
DSP and Multimedia Group: http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/research/dsp/index.html 
BT Group CTO Research and Venturing: http://www.bt.com