Sweden: 4 Ph.D Student in Speech Technology and Communication

Deadline: 28-07-2012

KTH School of Computer Science and Communication (CSC) announces 4 PhD positions in Speech Communication and Technology at the Depratment of Speech, Music and Hearing.

Assignment

KTH Computer Sicence and Communication (CSC) is looking for a PhD student in Speech Technology and Communication
The Speech group within TMH is a well-known and internationally distinguished research group, with a very strong publication record. This standing is evidenced by its wide participation in EU projects. The group is currently involved in half-a-dozen national and international research projects within our current research focus on interactional aspects of spoken face-to-face communication. The group has a special interest in building computational models of human conversational behaviour that is evaluated in spoken dialogue systems.
The goal of the 2-4 PhD student positions in Speech Technology and Communication is to contribute to the research foundation for speech technology in tomorrow’s conversational systems. A central research area is spoken interaction with artefacts like robots and avatars in virtual environments, based on human-like communication models. Face-to-face interaction implies audiovisual communication, where visual signals from face and body movements are of great importance.

Anticipated specializations

1. Data-driven Dialogue Management – development and evaluation of a dialogue authoring framework that includes data-driven methods for action selection and multimodal output generation.
2. Incremental Input Fusion and Understanding – data-driven semantic interpretation of input from several sources (speech, gesture, gaze, prosody) for conversational systems.
3. Avatars that Interact Through Speech, Gesture or Sign Language – data-driven generation of communicative head and body motion for interactional avatars.
4. Novel Methods for Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding – data-driven methods for the discovery of linguistic and lexical units of spoken language.

The following applies to each PhD postion at KTH. This is a four-year time-limited position that can be extended up to a year with the inclusion of a maximum of 20% departmental duties, usually teaching.  Doctoral students must be registered at KTH. The starting date is open for discussion, though ideally we would like the successful candidate to start as soon as possible.

Employment

Form of employment: Time-limited
Work time: Full time
The salary follows the directions provided by KTH
Start date: According to agreement
Number of positions: 4

Qualifications

To be admitted to the announced positions in the PhD education in Speech Communication and Technology, you must have a master’s degree (or an equivalent 4-year university degree) with a computational orientation (e.g. Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Computational Linguistics) or a background in Cognitive Science. Candidates with experience within the topics of Speech Technology, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Computer Animation, Linguistics (including phonetics and sign language), Human-Computer Interaction or Experimental Methodology are of special interest for the current positions. Programming experience in environments like Java, C/C++ or Matlab is beneficial. Additionally the applicant should have an excellent command of spoken and written English. Applicants must be strongly motivated for doctoral studies, possess the ability to work independently and perform critical analysis as well as possess good levels of cooperative and communicative abilities. To address its varied work, KTH aims to employ a diversity of talent and thus welcomes applicants who will add to the variety of the University, especially as concerns its gender structure.

Application

Application deadline: July 28, 2012
Employer's reference: D-2012-0224
Applications via email are to be sent to: Susanne Bergman, e-mail jobs@csc.kth.se
Write reference number in the email subject. (CV, etc. should be sent as an attachment, as pdf-files.)

Further Details.