Multimodal Interaction Group

A fully-funded 3.5 year PhD studentship is available in the area of multimodal interaction and home care systems on the EPSRC-funded “MMH: Multimodal Reminders in the Home” project. This is lead by Glasgow and is in collaboration with Edinburgh University and Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. We also have Halliday James Ltd, Forth Valley Sensory Services and Link as project partners.

The project as a whole is investigating home care systems with the aim of allowing people who need home care to stay at home longer rather than having to go into hospital. This is an important topic as the population in Western countries is ageing and there are fewer tax payers to fund healthcare. Our approach is to use mobile devices and sensors for monitoring people at home. The focus of the studentship will be on how best to deliver reminders to people. There are many uses for reminders, from reminders to take medication, to calendar, event and appointment reminders. Visual displays are not always appropriate as the user may not be near the screen or may have eyesight problems. We will study speech, non-speech audio, tactile and olfactory reminders to see which work best in which situations to allow people to get the information they need in a way that best suits their needs and social situation.

The focus of the PhD studentship will be to design and evaluate novel multimodal reminder and interaction techniques using mobile devices in the home. Some key areas to be investigated are to:

• Design and evaluate different types of mulimodal reminder displays in the lab, particularly using visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory displays;
• Development of test-bed reminder systems;
• Assessment of our multimodal reminders in people's homes to see how our designs work in real use;
• Developing open source multimodal reminder system demonstrators.

You can find information about our previous work in the area of multimodal interaction and our work on home care systems can be found on the MATCH project website. The PhD will give you the chance to design and evaluate exciting new multimodal interaction techniques for a wide range of different platforms (mobile phones, internet tablets, PCs, etc.) and give you excellent research skills in experimental design and evaluation in HCI.

The post is available from 1st October 2009 (the start date is negotiable) for 3.5 years and would suit applicants with a good honours or Masters degree in computing science, good programming skills and an interest in human-computer interaction and multimodal interaction. The student will be supervised by Professor Stephen Brewster and in the Department of Computing Science at Glasgow, working alongside a postdoctoral researcher (Dr Marilyn McGee-Lennon), plus another PhD and PostDoc in Edinburgh. Glasgow has a world leading research groups in human-computer interaction and is a really dynamic and exciting group of over 30 people looking at all aspects of HCI.

The studentship will fully fund a UK or EU student, paying full home fees plus the EPSRC standard living allowance (approximately £13,000/year). Unfortunately this studentship is not available to those with citizenship outside of the EU unless you have funding to cover the difference between home and overseas fees (if so, please include this in your application).

The closing date for applications is 6th July , 2009.

Applications

Applications should include a CV, two references and a covering letter. Application forms are available on line here. The academic referee letter is available on-line here (you dont need to include a research plan with your application). Applications should be sent to:

If you would like to discuss any aspect of the studentship please feel free to email me at stephen@dcs.gla.ac.uk