(More detail about this post.)

We are currently advertising a fully-funded PhD place within the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University for an October 2020 start date.

The scholarship is a Skills Development Scotland Collaborative award offered through the ESRC-funded Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (SGSSS). It is for a doctoral study on natural language interfaces to support career decision-making of young people. The practical work to be undertaken for this PhD centres on the development of a dialogue system utilising existing data held by Skills Development Scotland, for young people to engage ‘in conversation’ about their career interests, aspirations, and strengths. The system to be developed is anticipated to take the form of an interactive avatar with identifiable human characteristics.

The doctoral study will supervised by staff from two research groups within the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University: (1) the Centre for Social Informatics (Professor Hazel Hall), and (2) the Nature-inspired Intelligent Systems group (Dr Dimitra Gkatzia). A third supervisor from the School of Applied Sciences completes the team (Dr Pete Robertson). Our group has a strong track record of supervising SDS collaborative studentships, with two completions to date (in 2018 and 2019) and three on-going studentships.

We are keen to receive applications from Computer Science or Software Engineering Bachelors or Masters graduates (or those due to graduate in these or other relevant subjects in summer 2020), who have some experience of studying Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, or Machine Learning (e.g. as part of a module, or in a project), and have achieved (or are on target for) a 1st class or 2.1 degree.

The studentship is offered either as a 3 year programme at Edinburgh Napier University for a successful applicant who already holds a Masters qualification that includes 60 credits of research methods training, OR as a 4 year 1+3 programme for a successful applicant who does not yet hold such as Masters qualification. In the case of the latter, the first year – which is also fully funded (fees and stipend) – will be undertaken at the University of Edinburgh on the Masters programme in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies.

1. Applications for this studentship should be submitted to GradHub by Thursday 30th April 2020 at midday https://gradhub.sgsss.ac.uk/students/login
2. Interviews are scheduled for the afternoon Thursday May 7th 2020 (most likely online)
3. The start date for successful candidates is Thursday 1st October 2020
4. Full details of eligibility criteria and the application process (through GradHub) can be found on the Current studentship opportunities page of the SGSSS web site at https://www.sgsss.ac.uk/studentship/natural-language-interfaces/

After successfully completing the SGSSS application process (i.e. submission of application documents to GradHub, successful interview on 7th May , and studentship offer from SGSSS), the candidate to be appointed will be admitted to the PhD programme at Edinburgh Napier University.

For further information about this studentship, please contact Professor Hazel Hall (h.hall@napier.ac.uk) or Dr Dimitra Gkatzia (d.gkatzia@napier.ac.uk) .