UMEÅ UNIVERSITY – SWEDEN

PhD student position in signal processing
with an orientation towards Interactive Robotics
Research topic: Emotional Interaction

To promote mobility, the following rules apply to the offered position at Umeå University: The applicant must not be a national of Sweden unless the applicant holds also another nationality, and has not resided in Sweden during the previous 5 years. At the time of appointment, the applicant must not have resided or carried out his/her main activity in Sweden for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to his/her appointment. Exceptions are given if the applicant has legally resided and had his/her main activity in a non–Associated third country for at least 3 of the last 4 years immediately prior to his/her appointment.

The PhD student will join a training program in close cooperation with researchers from all partners. The network-wide training program includes a research project, courses, seminars, and workshops. In the research project, the PhD student will work with emotional understanding of facial expressions in video sequences. This involves developing global, analytical and semantic representation and manifold learning algorithms to enable generalization to new data. Facial emotions can be classified into different categories based on the facial mimic and the project aims at making use of these emotions to improve machine knowledge of human emotions and use this knowledge to improve the interaction between humans and machines. The project also involves extending the capabilities of an automatic system that infers mental states from expressions in non-verbal speech to various users and to real-time performance. One part of the project will be conducted at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

Applicants should have 240 ECTS-credits of higher education studies of which 60 should be on an advanced level (Master level). The applicant needs to be skilled in both oral and written communication in English, be able to work independently as well as in collaboration with others. Experience in robotics, image processing and signal processing are merits. Experience and knowledge in programming are needed.

Anticipated start date: 1st of August 2010. Career exploratory allowance and travel allowances will be available.

Questions about the position will be answered by Prof. Haibo Li, e-mail: haibo.li@tfe.umu.se.

Union information is available from SACO, +46-(0)90-786 53 65, SEKO, +46-(0)90-786 52 96 and ST, +46-(0)90-786 54 31.

The application should contain a CV, academic grades, a copy of degree project report and any publications, two personal references and one A4 sheet describing the personal motivation for applying for this position. Documents sent electronically should be in MS Word or PDF format. If you are applying to several positions with different reference numbers, you must submit a separate application for each position.

Your complete application, marked with reference number 313-192-10, should be sent to jobb@umu.se (state the reference number as subject) or to the registrar, Umeå University, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden to arrive April 15, 2009 at the latest.

We look forward to receiving your application!