1 April: fyi -- PhD funding, Edinburgh

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studentship award to commence in September 2005. The successful applicant will
work in the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems (ICCS) on a
project entitled 'IMAP: Tracking Multimodal Communication In Humans And Agents',
under the supervision of Prof. Mark Steedman, in Collaboration with
Dr. Max Louwerse of the University of Memphis.

This project addresses the problem of automatically generating speech with
intonation and facial animation appropriate to content, where this content
includes a representation of information structure, or relation to the discourse
context. The project will develop a framework for content specification that
allows purely algorithmic generation of speech via a grammar that covers
coordination and ellipsis as well as intonation structure. This framework will
be integrated with a discourse planner, and incorporated as a component in a
spoken dialogue system for instructional domains being developed in
collaboration with the the University of Memphis.

Applicants should have a good honours degree or equivalent in Computer Science
or Computational Linguistics. Familiarity with current techniques in natural
language generation or speech processing are highly desirable. Programming
experience is essential.

All candidates are eligible for 'home fees' and a maintenance allowance. For UK
and EU residents, this covers all fees. For non-EU candidates additional
funding to cover overseas fees will be sought.

The School of Informatics was formed in 1998 from the Centre for Cognitive
Science and the Departments of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science.
For more information about the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative
Systems (ICCS), see the following home page:

http://www.iccs.informatics.ed.ac.uk/

Information about students, the PhD Programme, and how to apply for a PhD can be
found by following the various links from the following URL:

http://www.iccs.informatics.ed.ac.uk/study/

Address for Applications:

Prof Mark Steedman
School of Informatics
2 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh EH8 9LW
United Kingdom

Contact Information:

Prof Mark Steedman
steedman@inf.ed.ac.uk
fax +131 650 4587

United Kingdom

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