Fwd: PhD studentship in computer vision, eye-tracking, and natural language, University of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh School of Informatics PHD STUDENTSHIP IN COMPUTER VISION, EYE-TRACKING, AND NATURAL LANGUAGE Applications are invited for a fully funded, three-year PhD studentship that combines ideas from computer vision, eye-tracking research, and natural language processing. The aim of the PhD project is to develop techniques for using human fixation data as recorded by an eye-tracker to train computer vision models, thus reducing the need for manual annotation. This approach will be augmented to exploit textual data (e.g., image captions) to improve object labeling. Another project aim is to crowd-source the eye-tracking data, e.g., through the use of webcams. Applicants for the studentship must have: * Strong undergraduate degree in computer science or a related discipline * Excellent programming skills * Solid mathematical foundations (especially linear algebra and probability theory) * Fluency in English, both written and spoken * UK or EU nationality -- this is mandatory; applicants of other nationalities will not be considered * Master's degree in a relevant area is desirable * Experience in computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, or eye-tracking is desirable The School of Informatics at Edinburgh is one of the top-ranked computer science departments in Europe and offers an exciting, interdisciplinary research environment. Edinburgh is a beautiful historic city with a high quality of life. Starting date: September 2013 as soon as possible after that. The PhD work will be carried out under the supervision of Dr. Vittorio Ferrari and Dr. Frank Keller, whose research interests can be found at: http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/calvin/ http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/keller/ For pre-screening, please send applications to the email address below, including: * Full CV * Full transcripts of both undergraduate and Master's degree (if applicable); this studentship requires high grades, especially in mathematics and programming courses * The names and email addresses of two referees * List of publications, if you have prior research experience Contact: Vittorio Ferrari, vferrari(a)staffmail.ed.ac.uk <mailto:vferrari@staffmail.ed.ac.uk> Deadline: 25 April 2013