[visionlist] PhD Studentships at Newcastle University

[Quoc Vuong]

Dear all,

Apologies for cross posting. There are 2 PhD studentships available at the Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University. For more information, please feel free to contact me or see the links below:

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/postgraduate/funding/search/list/ion89
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/postgraduate/funding/search/list/ion90


Happy Holidays!
Quoc.

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Application deadline: January 15, 2010
Project start date: on or before 30th March 2010

Eligibility and Value of the Award
Due to funding criteria, these studentships are open to UK and UK-resident applicants only. The award covers tuition fees at the UK rate and an annual stipend (approximately £13,290).

Person Specification
Applicants must have a first-class or upper-second-class Honours degree, or equivalent, in computer science, psychology, neuroscience, or a related discipline. Applicants should also have a strong interest in vision and its neural bases, and programming experience (eg Matlab, C).

PhD Descriptions
Project 1: Modelling Cross-species Behaviour to Discover General Principles of Visual Recognition (Supervisor: Dr Quoc Vuong)
How biological systems recognise faces and objects is both an important biological question and one that has applications in engineering. The aim of this studentship is to apply computational modelling to compare how the human visual system and the much simpler honeybee visual system, whose brain is about 0.1% the size of an average human brain, solve the problem of visual recognition. Knowledge of how different biological visual systems solve the vision problem can lead to the development of better artificial machine vision systems that can be adapted for particular tasks. Based on our previous behavioural work with humans and bees, our hypothesis is that there is a core set of general principles (eg algorithms) that many biological systems implement to solve difficult recognition problems. Importantly, these principles are simple enough to be implemented by the miniature bee brain yet powerful enough for visual recognition. The successful applicant will model behavioural data obtained from humans and bees performing similar recognition tasks to derive these principles and potentially apply them to machine vision systems.

Project 2: Measuring Perceived Healthiness: Extracting High-Level Feature Information from Colour Images of Faces (Supervisor: Prof Anya Hurlbert)
This PhD project aims to understand and predict how humans make judgments of health, age and attractiveness based on skin colour and texture. For example, how clinicians form immediate judgements of illness severity based on skin appearance. We will combine approaches from computer vision, human psychophysics, and colour science to quantify spectral properties of human faces and relate these to human perception and performance using statistical modelling. The project will address the important biological question of how humans extract high-level information from low-level sensory cues such as colour and brightness, as well as the engineering challenge of how to implement this human ability in machine vision. The project is highly interdisciplinary and the student will also work with co-supervisors Professor Gui Yun Tian (School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering) and Dr Shirley Coleman (Industrial Statistics Research Unit), and gain experience of hyperspectral imaging, visual psychophysics and neuroscience, image processing and statistical modelling.


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Institute of Neuroscience
School of Psychology
Henry Wellcome Building for Neuroecology
Newcastle University
Framlington Place
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE2 4HH
Tel: +44 (0)191 222 6183
Fax: +44 (0)191 222 5622
Web: www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/q.c.vuong/
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