PhD Studentship - Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training: Recognising facial movements for wellbeing (sponsored by GSK Consumer Healthcare) (SCI1951)

The Horizon Centre for Doctoral training (CDT) is recruiting a PhD student to carry out research in partnership with GSK Consumer Healthcare with a focus on recognising facial movements for wellbeing. Candidates are expected to have a background in Computer science or Chemistry, however candidates with backgrounds in other STEM subjects will be considered if they can demonstrate an interest and potential for research in the area covered by the theme.

About the Horizon CDT

The Horizon CDT Creating Our Lives in Data programme, aims to establish technologies and methods to enable producers and consumers in the Digital Economy to co-create smarter products in smarter ways, to re-establish trust in the use of personal data. 

The Centre brings together leading figures from computing and engineering as well as social sciences, business and humanities from the University of Nottingham; plus researchers from the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University. We are co-funded by EPSRC and over 40 industry, third sector and international partners.

Our students are innovating applications across sectors including consumer goods and food, creative industries, transport, high value products, and health and wellbeing – seeking out new synergies between them. We do not expect every student to be an expert in every area: our aim is to train people to work in transdisciplinary teams, ready to become future leaders in industry, the third sector and academia.

Our innovative four year PhD programme combines research, technical and professional skills training, an internship with a partner organisation, and opportunities for international exchanges. 

About the project - Recognising facial movements for wellbeing

This project is a BBSRC-funded iCASE studentship sponsored by GSK.  We are seeking to recruit a highly motivated student who is eager to work in a multi-disciplinary team with GSK involving computer scientists, material scientist, and experts in oral processing to apply novel motion visualisation, monitoring and analysis capabilities to uncover and quantify the pattern of oral movements and, more generally, oral behaviours of users of prosthetic and corrective dental devices. This goal is important because, increasingly, the use of dental devices requires individuals to adjust their behaviour to ensure everyday life and activities such as speech and eating are as natural as possible. With the growing interest in healthy aging and oral health, new approaches are needed to ensure effective development of customised dental devices and adhesive formulation to enable minimal adjustments to achieve natural facial motions.

This Project focusses on combining new advances in motion capture, computer-based analysis (including the use of novel deep learning algorithms) and Oral Processing analysis, to provide fundamental and genuinely new underpinning insights into facial motions during use of dental devices, denture adhesives and dental patches.

The student will gain broad experience in many different areas including:

Computer-vision based object and face tracking

Behaviour analysis and deep learning

Facial motion analysis

Oral processing & Food Science

See: https://cdt.horizon.ac.uk  for further details about our programme and how to apply.

Closing date: 30th June 2020.

Academic interviews: early July 2020

Closing Date: 30 Jun 2020
Category: Studentships