Connectionists: recruiting awesome European PhD students to London

[Gabriel J. Brostow]

Hello to all prospective European-resident PhD students!

We have funding for an unprecedented *three* PhD studentships. These are 
described below, where the 2nd one, "Spatiotemporal Models of Retinal 
Images" is particularly relevant to Connectionists.

Do get in touch if there are questions.
-Gabe


-- 
 			-Gabriel J. Brostow
 			 http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/G.Brostow


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UCL/MSR-Cambridge/RVC: PhD in Vision-based Tracking of Quadrupeds

If you love computer vision and coding, and want to have major impact on 
science (and you are considered an EU-resident), please read on!

We have funding for an excellent student from the EU to complete a 3 year 
Computer Science PhD at University College London. The co-supervisors for this 
project are Jamie Shotton of Microsoft Research Cambridge who leads the Kinect 
pose-estimation effort, and Thilo Pfau & Andrew Spence, animal locomotion 
experts at the Royal Veterinary College in north London.

This PhD combines computer vision, machine learning, graphics, and 
biomechanics. Applicants will develop skills and make contributions in all 
these areas, but should already be fairly strong in one or two of them.

Under the interdisciplinary supervision of experts in computer vision, biology, 
and veterinary medicine, the student will both build computer vision systems 
and use these to investigate real outstanding scientific and clinical 
questions. On the vision side, we believe recent advances in understanding 
human shape and motion can be extended to work for quadrupeds. Animals are 
substantially different to humans in interesting ways, and we have identified 
many hard technical issues here. On the biological side, we aim to investigate 
how body morphology and the ultimate constraints of stability, energetic cost, 
and dexterity shape animal gait. On the clinical side, this studentship will 
make essential contributions to applying the developed techniques across 
species with the potential for large welfare and economic benefits. This 
project offers the student a rare opportunity to become a world expert, guided 
by top specialists in vision and biology, just when their respective strengths 
are ready to be exploited.

At UCL Computer Science, the PhD student will be based in Gabriel Brostow's 
group in central London. The student will make visits to collect data and run 
experiments to the RVC in North London, and will have opportunities to spend 
periods of time at MSR-Cambridge. The student is expected to work with other 
students and postdocs in our teams and with the larger cohort of researchers at 
the three sites.

Programming experience desired: high proficiency in one or more of Matlab / C++ 
/ Python. The PhD is a time to learn new things, but the idealized candidate 
would have completed small projects with some combination of machine learning, 
GPU, Qt, OpenGL, and OpenCV-type libraries. As an example reference guide, see 
the topics covered in the Prince textbook, 
http://www.computervisionmodels.com/.

Application Instructions:
You'll need to submit an online application here as soon as possible: 
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/admissions/phd_programme/applying/. (Deadlines listed 
there do not apply to funded studentships like this. Recruiting ends when we 
find the right person.) Please make sure to put Gabriel Brostow as the 
supervisor but you should also email me *now* (g.brostow at ucl.ac.uk) so we 
know to look out for your application (and please use the text "kinect4legs" in 
the Subject line).

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UCL: PhD in Spatiotemporal Models of Retinal Images

If you love applying machine learning and want to help save babies from going 
blind (and you are considered an EU-resident), please read on!

We have funding for an excellent student from the EU to complete a 3 year 
Computer Science PhD at University College London.

This PhD combines machine learning, computer vision, and ophthalmology. 
Applicants will develop skills and make contributions in all three areas, but 
should already be fairly strong and excited about one or two of them.

The project aims to help clinicians screen for Retinopathy of Prematurity 
(ROP), an illness that causes blindness in premature babies when undetected. 
Read more about ROP further below. Our goal is to develop a model of how the 
retina looks over time a) when an eye is healthy, b) as ROP progresses, and c) 
as a result of laser treatment. The probabilistic generative model for these 
cases will be learned from image data of real
patients.
Subsequently at test time, given image(s) of a premature baby's retina, we will 
be able to assess the probability that the baby is healthy or at-risk. This 
research will be a form of structured texture-synthesis, with algorithms and 
applications beyond "just" medical images.

Retinpathy of Prematurity (ROP): ROP is one of the few ophthalmic conditions in 
which a diagnosis to treat or not is urgent. Screening is essential, but 
difficult. A simple retinal camera is needed, but also expertise and 
experience. Even in middle-income countries where a camera is available, there 
are often not enough qualified ROP experts to examine all the at-risk babies. 
In low-income countries there is currently a large proportion of premature 
infants facing a lifetime of blindness from untreated ROP due largely to a lack 
of screening facilities. Preliminary research has revealed further challenges. 
A fairly universal international grading system is used by experts to grade the 
severity of a case. However, research has shown that experts do not tend to 
agree on the grading for each eye because there is no agreed model of disease 
progression.

At UCL Computer Science, the PhD student will be based in Gabriel Brostow's 
group. The co-supervisor is Dr. Clare Wilson, Paediatric Ophthalmologist at 
Great Ormond Street Hospital, and at UCL Institute of Ophthalmology. The 
research areas overlap and the student is expected to work with other students 
and postdocs in our team (http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/g.brostow/#Students) 
and the larger cohort of vision + machine learning researchers here. UCL is in 
central London, and is one of the top 3 groups for Vision/Learning/Graphics in 
Europe. For ophthalmology expertise, this is THE place to be.

Programming experience desired: high proficiency in one or more of Matlab / C++ 
/ Python. The PhD is a time to learn new things, but the idealized candidate 
would have completed small projects with some combination of machine learning, 
GPU, Qt, and OpenCV-type libraries. As an example reference guide, see the 
topics covered in the Prince textbook, http://www.computervisionmodels.com/.

Application Instructions:
You'll need to submit an online application here as soon as possible: 
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/admissions/phd_programme/applying/. (Deadlines listed 
there do not apply to funded studentships like this.) Please make sure to put 
Gabriel Brostow as the supervisor but you should also email me *now* (g.brostow 
at ucl.ac.uk) so we know to look out for your application (and please use the 
text "synthROP" in the Subject line).


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UCL: PhD in multiview video analysis & special-effect synthesis

Our new project is co-funded by a large camera company and UCL's Impact 
Scholarship, and explores the research challenges of bringing Image/Video Based 
Rendering (IBR/VBR) into common use for content creators and action 
enthusiasts. Funding is limited to European Union applicants (sorry to everyone 
else)

This is an amazing opportunity to do your PhD on fun, hard, and direct-impact 
research problems. Whether or not you're the type of person who plays/watches 
sports, you will enjoy being able to work on projects that push forward machine 
learning / vision / graphics, and make beautiful-looking results (in part, by 
capturing action data in beautiful places).

The project and the studentships must start by September 2014, but applications 
are being considered now on a rolling basis. (i.e. the student should be signed 
up by summer-time) The existing funding is for a 3-year PhD (the typical length 
in the UK), but there is a chance of extending the funding to cover a 4th year 
of research, if things go well along the way.

At UCL, the PhD student will be based in Gabriel Brostow's group. The research 
area overlaps and the student is expected to work with others in the larger 
cohort of vision + graphics researchers here. We have some specific topics 
where innovation is needed:
- View interpolation
- Semantic texture synthesis
- Depth from intensity
- Video-texture synthesis
- Active Learning
- Video matting
- Video inpainting

Programming experience desired: high proficiency in one or more of Matlab / C++ 
/ Python

Exposure to some of the following areas is a plus:
- 3D Acquisition
- Camera Calibration
- Machine Learning
- Texture Synthesis
- Content Creation / Visual Effects
- User Interface Development (e.g. Qt)
As an example reference guide, see the topics covered in the Prince textbook, 
http://www.computervisionmodels.com/.

About us:
UCL is in central London, and is one of the top 3 groups for 
Vision/Graphics/Learning in Europe. Our people are fun and productive :)

Application Instructions:
You'll need to submit an online application here as soon as possible: 
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/admissions/phd_programme/applying/ but you should also 
email me (Gabriel Brostow) *now* so I know to look out for your application 
(and please use the text "smartVinterp" in the Subject line).

We only see the online applications after all your letters of recommendation 
etc. have arrived; we'll obviously prompt the CS Admission Panel to assess each 
batch of good applications that we're aware of. Good applicants in the past 
have had an MSc project in a related area, evidence of being productive in some 
detail-oriented domain, appetite for scholarly reading/writing, and enormous 
drive. If you're reading this, you're probably pretty smart/ambitious, but for 
a PhD, you also need to be enthusiastic, creative, and *very* persistent. 
Again, it pains me enormously that even great candidates from non-EU countries 
CAN NOT be considered for this funded studentship directly.

--
                         -Gabriel J. Brostow
                          http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/G.Brostow