26 June: fyi -- HCI, Edinburgh

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Multimodal Reminders in the Home

3.5 year PhD studentship at the School of Informatics, University of
Edinburgh

The project will investigate the effects of aging and hearing loss on
the usability and intelligibility of auditory reminders in the home
environment. Speech and non-speech audio reminders will be compared
systematically under a variety of realistic conditions. Experiments
will be based on a dual-task paradigm, where participants perform a
distractor task while attending to and/or acting on auditory
reminders.

The project is a collaboration with the Department of Computer
Science, Glasgow (Prof. Brewster, Dr. McGee-Lennon), and the
Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Queen Margaret University
(Pauline Campbell, Christine DePlacido). The successful candidate will
be working closely with a PhD candidate at Glasgow who will be
specialising in multimodal reminders, in particular tactile and
olfactory reminders. Both candidates will collaborate on a pilot
reminder system that will be trialled in users' homes.

This project would suit candidates from a variety of backgrounds,
including human-computer interaction, speech science, audiology,
medical physics, rehabilitation engineering, ergonomics, phonetics, or
cognitive psychology.

All applicants should have completed their first degree before taking
up the post. Applicants should have at least basic programming skills
(at least one of Java, C++, Python). Skills in experimental design and
statistics are highly desirable. Familiarity with software such as
SPSS, matlab, or R is a bonus. Applicants should also be open to
qualitative approaches to research.

The position is fully funded for 3.5 years through a stipend from the
UK Engineering Physical Sciences and Research Council. The stipend is
currently around ?12900 per annum. In addition, fees for UK and
European students are covered.

The School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, came top in the
last UK Research Assessment Exercise. The School offers a wide range
of support and courses for post-graduate students. For further
information about the Centre for Speech Technology Reseach, Edinburgh,
see the website listed above.

For further information about the Informatics PhD programme, see
http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/phd.html

For more information about the Multimodal Interaction Group, Glasgow, see
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~stephen/

For more information about Speech and Hearing Sciences , QMU, see
http://www.qmu.ac.uk/sls

The successful candidate will start on October 1, 2009. Provisionally, the
supervisors will be Prof Steve Renals, Dr Maria Wolters, and Dr Marilyn
McGee-Lennon (Glasgow).

For further information, please contact Dr Maria Wolters at the email listed below.

Application Deadline: 01-Sep-2009

Web Address for Applications: http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/apply.html

Contact Information:
Dr Maria Wolters
maria.wolters@ed.ac.uk
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mwolters

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