Automatic Audiovisual Analysis of Naturalistic Behaviour

Department of Computing

Fixed term appointments for up to 18 months

Research Assistant salary: £27,400 to £30,450 per annum

Research Associate salary: £31,300 to £39,920 per annum

The Department of Computing is a leading department of Computer Science among UK Universities. It has consistently been awarded the highest research rating (5*) in Research Assessment Exercises (RAE), coming 2nd in the 2008 RAE, and was rated as "Excellent" in the previous national assessment of teaching quality.

An opportunity has arisen for two Scientific Programmers for the prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant funded project on human naturalistic behaviour analysis. The purpose of the project is to attempt to build automated tools for machine understanding of human interactive behaviour in naturalistic contexts. The envisioned technology will be based on findings in cognitive sciences and it will represent a set of visual and audiovisual spatiotemporal methods for automatic analysis of human spontaneous (as opposed to posed and exaggerated) patterns of behavioural cues including continuous analysis of human-human and human-computer interactive behaviour.

Within the project, the applicant will be responsible for development of new and optimisation of the existing Matlab and C++ code for audiovisual continuous analysis and interpretation of human behaviour. More specifically, the aim is to design and develop set of C++ tools (some based on the existing Matlab code) for effective and efficient, multimodal analysis and interpretation of human naturalistic behaviour that take into account non-linear correlations between multimodal cues (facial expressions, head and body gestures, and various vocalizations) in space and time.

You should have proven knowledge and track record in scientific programming in one or more of the following areas: machine learning, multimodal data fusion, vision-based and audiovisual human behaviour analysis (in particular facial expression recognition, body gesture analysis, and vocal behaviour analysis). You will also have experience with working on large scientific projects.  For a Research Assistant post you will have a good first degree or Masters degree (or equivalent) in an area pertinent to the research subject, i.e. Computing and Engineering.  For a Research Associate post you will have a PhD (or equivalent) in the above.  All applicants must be fluent in English. 

You will be part of the Intelligent Human Behaviour Understanding Group (iBUG), Visual Information Processing Research Section, within the Computing Department and based at the South Kensington campus. For further information on the group and projects see:

http://ibug.doc.ic.ac.uk/~maja/

To apply:

Our preferred method of application is online via our website at: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/employment (please select “job search” then enter the job title or vacancy reference number EN2012XXXXXX into “keywords”).  Please complete and upload an application form as directed.

Applications must include:

• A college application form, quoting reference: MAH09-SE MP 0212
• A full CV including University degree & dates, past & present posts and relevant responsibilities during each post, programming skills & list of scientific projects
• A 1page statement indicating what you see as challenging and interesting issues relating to this post, your relevant expertise and future research plans.

Should you have any queries regarding the application process please contact Joanne Day: research.officer@doc.ic.ac.uk

Closing Date: 4 weeks (9^th March 2012)

Committed to equality and valuing diversity.  We are also an Athena Bronze SWAN Award winner and a Stonewall Diversity Champion.