I’m advertising the below funded PhD position at Kent, for September 2015 entry. If you know of any people who may be interested or relevant mailing lists, please do feel free to forward the details on.
anna
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Funded PhD Project: Incorporating self-evaluation into computational creativity systems (School of Computing, University of Kent)
We invite applications for a three year, funded PhD degree. This project will be supervised by Dr Anna Jordanous in Computing, University of Kent, at our Medway campus.
In exploring how computers can perform creative tasks, computational creativity research has produced many systems that can generate creative products or creative activity. Evaluation, a critical part of the creative process, has not been employed to such a great extent within creative systems. Recent work has concentrated on evaluating the creativity of such computational systems, but this has consisted of the system(s) being evaluated by external evaluators. Incorporation of self-evaluation into computational creativity systems would be a useful contribution to this research area. This work would also contribute towards exploring an important philosophical issue in computational creativity: is it the software that is being creative, or the programmers behind the software?
In this project the PhD candidate will explore evaluation methods for evaluating both the quality of output from a creative system and the creativity of the system itself. The candidate will experiment with incorporating evaluation methods into a creative system and analyse the results to explore how computational creativity systems can incorporate self-evaluation. The creative systems studied could be in the area of musical or linguistic creativity, or in a creative area of the student's choosing.
Applicants should normally have a first class honours or equivalent undergraduate degree in a relevant subject, such as Computer Science. A good Master's degree or relevant industry experience may also be accepted.
The expected start date is 29 September 2015.
The award is for 3 years if progression is satisfactory. For UK and EU applicants the award will provide a total amount of £17,859 in 2015/16. This is in the form of a maintenance grant of £13,863 a year and fees (currently £3,996). In subsequent years, the award will rise in line with any increase in fees. An overseas recipient of the award will receive the same total amount as would a UK or EU applicant, but will need to demonstrate that they can fund the difference (currently £10,864) between international and home fees.
Support for research students includes regular supervision meetings, a research training programme, computer equipment, a desk in an office and funds for conference travel.
