Dr Dermot Kerr
No more applications being accepted
Funded PhD Project (European/UK Students Only)
About the Project
Applications are invited for a DfE funded PhD studentship tenable in the Faculty of Computing and Engineering at the Magee Campus. Please note that a faculty reorganisation is underway at Ulster and this studentship will be based within the new structure in the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment.
Project Summary:
The recent demand for video surveillance systems to reduce security threats and criminal activities has brought challenges due to both the overwhelmingly vast amount of content to monitor and the limited physical resources with which to do it. Automated artificial vision technology is becoming more widely adopted for monitoring and surveillance applications to reduce the need for physical resources and human intervention. Human activity analysis and prediction is one of the most desired features of an automated video surveillance systems and often involves tracking and the recognition of motion or other explicit action traits which are voluntarily performed by humans. However, there are often many ‘unseen actions’ that can be used to infer and ultimately predict human behaviour.
Social signals are communicative and informative signals that directly or indirectly provide information through a range of non-verbal behavioural cues including facial expressions, body postures and gestures, and vocal outbursts. Social Signal Processing (SSP) aims to provide a framework for systematic, algorithmic and computational analysis of social signals, building on existing knowledge from anthropology and social psychology. This project will build on this SSP knowledge and recent advances in artificial vision technology (e.g. visually analysing relevant behavioural cues like blinks, smiles, crossed arms, facial expressions, and similar) in order to design and develop automated video surveillance systems for prediction. This project will be supervised by academics from the School of Computing and Intelligent Systems and the School of Psychology.
Entrance Requirements:
Candidates should have ordinary UK residence to be eligible for both fees and maintenance. Non UK residents who hold ordinary EU residence may also apply but if successful will receive fees only. All applicants should hold a first or upper second class honours degree in Computer Science or a cognate area. Applications will be considered on a competitive basis with regard to the candidate’s qualifications, skills experience and interests. Successful candidates will enrol as of 1 October 2017, on a full-time programme of research studies leading to the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
The studentship will comprise fees together with an annual stipend of £14,553 and will be awarded for a period of up to three years subject to satisfactory progress.
To receive advice on this project please contact:-
Dr Dermot Kerr ([Email Address Removed]).
Procedure
For more information on applying go to ulster.ac.uk/research
Apply online ulster.ac.uk/applyonline
The closing date for receipt of completed applications is 28th April 2017
Interviews will be held in May 2017