Exploring the potential of human-like computing methods and applications in education or healthcare

Intelligent, ‘human-like’ applications, 3D games, and interfaces are becoming more common in our everyday lives, and as an important area of focus within the fields of Multimedia / Human-Computer Interaction research. Such applications may often use a multitude of sensor-based techniques informed by, for example, affective wearables, user physiological responses, facial expressions, gestural inputs, natural language inputs, location-based context-based information to enable such applications to interact intelligently with the user. Whilst a multitude of commercialised examples of such applications have begun to permeate our daily lives, for example in the form of smartphone assistants (e.g. Siri), home-robot assistants, smart home hubs, self-driving cars, mixed reality wearables, little effort has been invested into exploring the potential of using such technologies specifically to make a positive impact on people’s lives within the health and education domains. There is a need to explore the value of designing, developing and applying such applications within the education and healthcare space. Hence, we invite applications from candidates that have an interest in the area of intelligent human-like computing and exploring the potential of designing, developing, and evaluating prototype applications within the education and healthcare domain. Candidates should have good software/prototype design and development skills. Experience of carrying out user-centred research and collecting and analysing both qualitative and quantitative data is also desirable.