2011-04-01: Job: PhD position in Visual Analytics at Middlesex University, UK (UKVAC)

PhD Studentships, School of Engineering and Information Sciences, Middlesex University, London, UK

Middlesex University and UKVAC

Middlesex University leads the UK Visual Analytics Consortium (UKVAC), which comprises Imperial College, University College London, Bangor University, and Oxford University. The University was also a member of the European visual analytics network VisMaster and has strong connections with leading US visual analytics research institutes such as National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC), Purdue University, and Georgia Institute of Technology.

Research Projects

We are seeking to appoint up to four well-qualified and talented candidates to PhD Studentships to complement our research efforts in two major research projects.

• Project 1: CRISIS is a €3.5 million (US$ 5 million) European project aimed at researching and developing a training simulation environment for airport crisis and emergency managers. It uses the latest computer game technology to enable individual, team, and teams of teams training, within a service and between services, and from front-line operators to commanders in the command post.

• Project 2: MAKING SENSE is a £2.3 million (US$ 3.7 million) UK project aimed at researching and developing the next generation visual analytics systems that support information analysts in making sense of large, mixed format, multi-sourced data sets of poor reliability.

Research Topics

The proposed PhD topics are listed below. Successful candidates, on further study will be allowed to re-negotiate more specific aspects of the topic to investigate:

Topics for CRISIS

• Transfer of learning effects in team coordination and decision-making between computer-based crisis management training the real world.
• The effect of realism in the design of computer games used for expertise development in crisis management training simulators.

Topics for MAKING SENSE

• Systems architecture for a visual analytics system
• Interactive visualisation for provenance handling in evidence analysis in large data sets

Position

The Studentships are offered on a full-time basis and cover a maintenance award, fee payments (at the UK/EU rate) and research support costs. The Studentships are for three years, subject to satisfactory progress. The maintenance award is currently £13,590 (about US$22,000) per annum and it is free of both tax and national insurance contributions. In addition to work on the doctoral research project, successful applicants will be expected to contribute to associated activities within the school.

Contact

For informal discussions about the topics, please contact Professor William Wong (w.wong@mdx.ac.uk) and Dr Kai Xu (k.xu@mdx.ac.uk), at the Interaction Design Centre.