[info] PhD studentships in AI for Sound (CVSSP, University of Surrey, UK)

[Ignatius S. Condro Atmawan B.]

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Mark Plumbley   <m.plu...@SURREY.AC.UK>


Dear List, Please forward the PhD opportunities below to potential
candidates. I would particularly like to encourage applications from
women, disabled and Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic candidates, since
these groups are currently underrepresented in our area. Many thanks,
Mark Plumbley

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The AI for Sound project (https://ai4s.surrey.ac.uk/) in the Centre for
Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at the University of Surrey
is offering the following PhD studentships in AI for Sound, available
from 1 October 2021:

        (1) Automatic sound labelling for broadcast audio

        (2) Information theoretic learning for sound analysis (UK applicants)

Application Deadline: 1 August 2021
CVSSP also has a number of ongoing PhD studentship opportunities for
outstanding PhD candidates in all aspects of audio-visual signal
processing, computer vision and machine learning, including for research
related to machine learning and audio signal processing.
We also welcome enquiries from self-funded and part-funded candidates.

For informal enquiries on opportunities related to AI for Sound, please
contact Prof Mark Plumbley (m.plu...@surrey.ac.uk).

Further information how to apply below.

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** PhD studentship opportunities in AI for Sound project **

(1) Automatic sound labelling for broadcast audio

The aim of this project is to develop new methods for automatic
labelling of sound environments and events in broadcast audio, assisting
production staff to find and search through content, and helping the
general public access archive content. The project will undertake a
combination of interviews and user profiling, analysis of audio search
datasets, and categorisation by audio experts to determine the most
useful terminology for production staff and the general public as user
groups. The project will develop a taxonomy of labels, and examine the
similarities and differences between each group. The project will also
investigate the application of a labelled library in a production
environment, examining workflows with common broadcast tools, then
integrating and evaluating prototype systems.  The project will also
investigate methods for automatic subtitling of non-speech sounds, such
as end-to-end encoder-decoder models with alignment, to directly map the
acoustic signal to text sequences. Working with BBC R&D, the student
will develop software tools to demonstrate the results, especially for
broadcasting and the management of audiovisual archive data, and
benchmark the results against human-assigned tags and descriptions of
audio content. Using archive data provided by BBC R&D, the student will
engage with audio production and research experts through Expert Panels,
and potential end users through Focus Groups. As part of this PhD, you
will have the opportunity for close day-to-day collaboration with the
BBC as a member of the R&D Audio Team.

Application Deadline: 1 August 2021

More information and how to apply:
https://www.surrey.ac.uk/fees-and-funding/studentships/automatic-sound-labelling-broadcast-audio


(2) Information theoretic learning for sound analysis

(Funding Eligibility: UK applicants only)

The aim of this PhD project is to investigate information theoretic
methods for analysis of sounds. The Information Bottleneck (IB) method
has emerged as an interesting approach to investigate learning in deep
learning networks and autoencoders. This project will investigate
information-theoretic approaches to analyse sound sequences, both for
supervised learning methods such convolutive and recurrent networks, and
unsupervised methods such as variational autoencoders. The project will
also investigate direct information loss estimators, and new
information-theoretic processing structures for sound processing, for
example involving both feed-forward and feedback connections inspired by
transfer information in biological neural networks.

Application Deadline: 1 August 2021

More information and how to apply:
https://www.surrey.ac.uk/fees-and-funding/studentships/information-theoretic-learning-sound-analysis


** Other PhD studentships in the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal
Processing (CVSSP) **

CVSSP also has a number of PhD studentship opportunities for outstanding
PhD candidates, including for research related to machine learning and
audio signal processing. For more information see
https://www.surrey.ac.uk/centre-vision-speech-signal-processing/postgraduate-research-study
and scroll to "PhD studentship opportunities at CVSSP"

For informal enquiries on opportunities related to AI for Sound, please
contact Prof Mark Plumbley (m.plu...@surrey.ac.uk).

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Prof Mark D Plumbley
Head of School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering
Email: Head-of-S...@surrey.ac.uk

Professor of Signal Processing
University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK
Email: m.plu...@surrey.ac.uk

PA: Kelly Green
Email: k.d....@surrey.ac.uk

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