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PhD studentship available
 
Closing date: 30th April, 2006.
 
A fully-funded three-year PhD studentship is available in the Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK on the SFC funded project "MATCH: Mobile Advanced Technologies for Care at Home". 
Overview of the project
MATCH (Mobilising Advanced Technologies for Care at Home) is a collaborative research project focused on technologies for care at home. The project has specialised expertise in home care networks, lifestyle monitoring, multimodal interaction (including speech technology), and assistive technology. The intended end users are those being cared for at home and those involved in caring for them.
The project is investigating how to design, deploy and integrate home care technologies in order to: 
maintain the independence of those receiving social and health care at home 
improve their quality of life 
enhance the care they receive at home 
ease the burden on their carers 
The project is a collaboration among the Universities of Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling (lead partner). The project is also supported by external partners such as British Telecom, Dementia Services Development Centre, NHS Forth Valley, Sensorium Commercial, Tunstall Group and West Lothian Council. 
Aims and Objectives
 
The role of the Glasgow MATCH PhD student is to investigate computer-based support to enable the users of home-care systems, along with other stakeholders, to develop, deploy, and configure these systems. In particular, the research is intended to address the resolution of potentially conflicting demands imposed on such systems by its users and others, by developing a multi-perspective model of the system and its use that enables different points of view to be expressed and that can be used to represent conflicts and conflict resolution strategies. The research will also involve the development and evaluation of specialised software tools that allow users to view, edit, and annotate these models and to generate executable prototypes of systems specified by the models. Furthermore, it is expected that the models developed as part of this work will have to relate to system model descriptions (e.g., in UML) and the tools will have to interoperate with home automation networks and the devices accessible via such networks.
 
The student will be expected to work within MATCH's interdisciplinary community, made up of specialists in human-computer interaction, health informatics, assistive technology, speech technology, lifestyle monitoring and policy-based autonomic computing. In particular, the student will work alongside Glasgow's MATCH research associate who is investigating the use multimodal interaction and technology for care at home.
 
Applications are invited for this three year PhD post funded by the SFC (Scottish Funding Council) from 1st October 2006 to 30th Sept 2009. Applicants must have (or hope to get) a good honours degree or equivalent in computing science and would benefit from any/all of: 
 
A thorough understanding of Human-Computer Interaction 
Excellent programming skills 
Knowledge of distributed systems and mobile context-aware systems 
Knowledge of sensors and sensor networks 
Knowledge of multimodal interaction 
Knowledge of or an interest in care in the home setting 
 
The studentship will be funded at the normal rate of £12,000 per year.
The start date will be 1/10/06 but is negotiable.
Applications
Please send three copies of your CV and covering letter giving the names of two academic referees to the address below. The closing date for application is 30th April, 2006.
 
Jacqui Brannan
Department of Computing Science
University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, 
UK
(0141 330 6037, email [log in to unmask]) 
 
Informal enquiries may be made to Stephen Brewster on 0141 330 4966, [log in to unmask] 
See the MATCH website for more details. 
www.match-project.org.uk
 

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