KMi Charter Studentships
The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) is home to a large team of leading international researchers in semantic web, educational multimedia, collaboration technologies, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction. KMi offers students an intellectually challenging environment with exceptional research and computing facilities. You will be joining a dynamic PhD programme in the laboratory that combines with colleagues in Computing and Educational Technology into our Centre for Research in Computing to form a significant community of student researchers.
To celebrate The Open University's 40th Anniversary we are offering a number of research studentships.
These studentships provide opportunities for the best national or international candidates to work alongside leading academics and research staff on projects that will inspire and shape our research portfolio. They will cover all fees for three years plus an annual stipend and are tenable from 1 October 2009. Suitable candidates should have or expect to graduate with a minimum 2:1 honours degree.
Closing date: Monday 17th August 2009
Supporting the Exploration of Research Spaces
Exploration and decision-making in complex domains, such as research, typically involves the retrieval and analysis of large volumes of complex, heterogeneous information from distributed sources. Existing tools available to users do not adequately support this process, therefore resulting in a significant degree of manual effort by the decision-maker.The growing availability of Linked Data on the Web provides a fabric of structured data upon which tools can be developed that reduce the manual aggregation effort and bring more sophisticated analysis capabilities to users. Capitalising on this trend, the main goal of the proposed PhD research is to develop a suite of methods and tools to support the exploration of research spaces, providing functionalities well beyond the current state of the art.
Specifically, the proposed research may address one or more of a number of issues, including:
- How can the variety of distributed data, which currently exist in Semantic Web formats, be integrated with standard bibliographic data and used to improve the exploration of research spaces?
- How can the variety of distributed data, which currently exist in Web 2.0 repositories in a semi-structured form be integrated with both standard bibliographic data and Semantic Web resources, and used to improve the exploration of research spaces?
- In addition to the classic indicators of academic excellence (e.g., citations), other indicators of 'academic kudos' can now be found or mined from the Web. How can these various types of indicators be explored in an integrated way, to improve the accuracy of expert ranking?
- What kind of novel visualization, navigation and data mining techniques can most effectively support students and researchers in making sense of research spaces?
- How can the key evolutionary research trends be identified and linked to concrete academic activities, such as conferences, publishing, etc.?
- How might the methods and tools developed in this research be applicable to related areas of exploration and decision-making, such as reporting and analytics in a business domain, or product selection in the consumer realm?
For further information, or informal discussion about the position, please contact:
Professor Enrico Motta.
Networks & Ontologies for Transforming Broadcasting
The ultimate goal of this research work is to develop flexible/adaptive end-to-end architecture, based on semantic technologies, for personalised creation, distribution and consumption of TV content. The project will take a user-centric approach to investigate fundamental aspects of consumers' content-customisation needs, interaction requirements and entertainment wishes, which will shape the future of the "TV" in all its new forms. This PhD. research will provide a semantic future for broadcasting.For further information, or informal discussion about the position, please contact:
Professor John Domingue.
Evaluation of Semantic Web Service Tools
Semantic Web Services is an emerging area of research which has delivered a number of Semantic technologies and tools for the enrichment and use of Web Services via several initiatives such as the Conceptual Model for Services Working Group (http://cms-wg.sti2.org). In Kmi we have developed the IRS-III platform (http://technologies.kmi.open.ac.uk/irs), which has been used within several projects such as DIP (http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/dip) and SOA4ALL (http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/soa4all). KMi seeks a PhD student to pursue research on the evaluation of Semantic Web Service tools in the context of the SEALS project (http://www.seals-project.eu). The goal of this project is to develop a platform for the automatic evaluation of semantic-based technologies. The SEALS Platform will provide an integrated set of evaluation services and test suites which will be used in two global public evaluation campaigns. You are expected to devise common metrics and evaluation algorithms for diverse Semantic Web Service approaches that can be implemented via an API.For further information, or informal discussion about the position, please contact:
Dr Liliana Cabral.
Science Proxies / Mash-up Personal Environments
The Open University is coordinating the EU Network of Excellence STELLAR, which is working around networks to identify and support 'the grand challenge' for Technology Enhanced Learning. (See: http://stellarnet.eu). KMi seeks a graduate to pursue a PhD. in this area and support its technology-enhanced learning team in the Centre for New Media. One aspect of this research is to help the 21st century researcher in TEL to work effectively using Web 2.0 technologies - mashing together resources and feeds; visualizing communities and issues and bringing both the user and producer of scientific work together. Understanding new frameworks for mashing, mixing and visualizing learning, work and now science is a very exciting new field.For further information, or informal discussion about the position, please contact:
Dr Peter Scott.
What makes a good picture?
This PhD project aims at uncovering the secrets of a good photograph. You are expected to develop computational algorithms that can set aside the very best photos of a set of similar photos - based on photographic design principles, trained with decisions taken by users, and based on learning from user comments on public photo sharing sites such as flickr and picassa. You will research and derive suitable high and low-level features from digital images that allow classification of photos as "good" and that allow categorisation of the emotive content of a digital image. You might use principles of simplicity (objects can easily be separated from the background), realism (eg, particular use of colour palette), basic techniques (right exposure, have areas with distinct focus, suitable colour, intensity and sharpness contrast) and composition principles. Armed with these features you will study, deploy, devise and modify machine learning algorithms that predict which photos make good representatives out of a bigger set of photographs.For further information, or informal discussion about the position, please contact:
Professor Stefan Rueger.
Intelligent support for exploratory learning from web content
The aim of this studentship is to design, develop and test an approach to supporting exploratory learning from web content. Building on current research, you would need to devise an approach that gives the student enough freedom and choice over their learning whilst still providing sufficient guidance to ensure a successful outcome. This will draw on our current projects such as the EPSRC funded SILVER project that is researching how new technology can enable school students to learn by carrying out investigations using an archive of images (see: http://www.silvereducation.co.uk/). Our current work on this project is investigating how students can learn about sustainability by analysing images of buildings from different times and locations, building visualisations of their findings and comparing their work on a group or class level. Our other related projects would provide you with opportunities to carry out this research in either a school or Higher Education context. Related projects and publications can be found at http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/paulm.For further information, or informal discussion about the position, please contact:
Dr Paul Mulholland.
Other Studentship Vacancies
The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) is home to internationally recognised researchers in semantic technologies, educational multimedia, collaboration technologies, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction. KMi offers students an intellectually challenging environment with exceptional research and computer facilities.
We are currently seeking applications for full-time, 3-year research studentships on the following PhD projects. We strongly recommend that you contact the lead researcher directly to discuss your interest prior to writing your proposal.
Semantic Adaptivity and Social Networking in Personal Learning Environments
The aim of this PhD project is to employ a combination of Semantic and Social Web technologies in order to enhance adaptivity and networking in Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). The PhD student will explore new ways of making the learning process adaptive to the learner’s needs through the use of ontologies and metadata, as well as enabling the learner to actively engage with a community sharing common learning objectives.(open until filled)
Visual Digital Libraries
The overall aim of the project is to facilitate visual access to digital libraries through novel visual search paradigms in additional to the traditional text search approach. You will research (and develop) new search engines based on visual retrieval methods: For example, the user submits an image of an oil painting to retrieve all documents in the digital library that depict (and discuss) the very same painting. This task, also known as near identical search, should be able to recognise images, where the query is only part of an image, say the head of a particular person.(open until filled)
Visual interfaces for search engines using query by example
The overall aim of the project is to facilitate visual access to digital libraries through novel browsing, search and visualisation paradigms in addition to the traditional text search approach. You will research (and develop) new interfaces for search engines based on visual retrieval methods. Rather than typing a text query the user is enabled to submit pictures and/or video clips; the novel interfaces make use of the screen to display results in an intuitive way for navigation, change of the visual query and browsing with a view to visually explore the digital library.(open until filled)
