PhD Research Projects

Prospective PhD Students

I am always happy to receive applications for PhD study from good students.

I am particularly keen to receive applications from students with interests in Machine Listening or any of its applications, including:

  • Robust Automatic Speech Recognition systems able to mimic the human ability to interpret speech in a wide variety of acoustic environments. </li>

  • Audio surveillance, i.e. machines able to listen to live audio recordings and act on the basis of their ‘understanding’ of the acoustic scene. Consider the security benefits, of audio-based burglar-detectors able to detect intruders in poor light and without the blind spots of light based systems; systems able to monitor the well-being of the elderly or infirm in their own houses, responding to the sound of a fall or a cry of distress, for example; public surveillance systems which use audio to supplement CCTV video and which can detect unexpected acoustic events and relay data to manned command centres. </li>

  • Audio information indexing and retrieval – e.g. systems that process audio or audio-visual archives (such as YouTube) and automatically add consistent semantic search tags. Such automated tagging will be a key technology in the expansion of the semantic web.

  • Social robotics, i.e. robots that form a human-like model of the world to enable them to act and interact in an intuitive and natural manner. </li>

  • Intelligent hearing aids able to suppress background noise without removing sound sources that might be significant to the listener. </li>

If you are interested in a PhD in one of these areas please get in contact. If you require funding then there are a number of opportunities available.