PhD studentships in Multimedia Information Retrieval

3-year fully-funded PhD projects available (Oct. 2012-Sept.2015) at the
Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK (30 min by fast train from London)
Stipend: £40,770 (£13,590/year)
Application deadline: 7th June 2012 

1. Lifestyle Logs

The ambition of this project is to analyse lifestyle pictures that users take with their smartphones of
meals they eat, drinks they have, sports they do, etc: The tasks are to classify these pictures
automatically recognising the activity, measuring and logging automatically as much relevant data as
is possible for these activities. The research for this project is firmly placed in the areas of image
retrieval and machine learning...

Interested? Read more on http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/lifestyle-logs.php

2. Linking nature to databases with your smartphone

You will research and develop analysis tools that are able to look up smartphone snaps of certain types of
natural objects (eg, rocks or butterflies) in image databases. These tools are meant to support not only
image search but also interactive image browsing activities by exploiting partial visual aspects such
as colour and texture...

Interested? Read more on http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/linking-nature-to-databases-with-your-smartphone.php

3. What makes a good picture?

This PhD project aims at uncovering the secrets of a good photograph. You are expected to develop
computational algorithms that can set aside the very best photos of a set of similar photos - based on
photographic design principles, trained with decisions taken by users, and for example based on
learning from user comments on public photo sharing sites such as flickr and picassa. You will research