The Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR), the Institute ofCommunicating and Collaborative Systems (ICCS), and the HumanCommunication Research Centre (HCRC) in Edinburgh invite applicationsfor three-year PhD studentships starting in September 2006.

CSTR and ICCS combine to form the world’s largest concentration ofresearchers studying the theoretical, computational, and cognitiveaspects of language and speech. HCRC provides an interdisciplinaryresearch environment that includes staff from the School ofInformatics and the School of Philosophy, Psychology and LanguageSciences pursuing research into the communication among humans andbetween humans and machines, using text, speech, and graphics. Allthree Institutes also have a strong track record in applied andindustry-sponsored research.

PhD students will work on topics drawn from the following areas(potential supervisors are listed in brackets):
o Speech technology (Rob Clark, Simon King, Steve Renals, Hiroshi Shimodaira): conversational agents, multimodal interaction, prosody and information structure, speech recognition, speech synthesis
o Cognitive science (Jean Carletta, Frank Keller, John Lee, Jon Oberlander, Helen Pain, Keith Stenning): computational psycholinguistics, educational technology, graphical communication, human reasoning
o Computational linguistics (Claire Grover, Ewan Klein, Philipp Koehn, Mirella Lapata, Alex Lascarides, Oliver Lemon, Colin Matheson, Johanna Moore, Miles Osborne, Mark Steedman, Henry Thompson, Richard Tobin, Bonnie Webber): annotation and markup, biomedical NLP, computational semantics, discourse and dialogue, information extraction, machine translation, generation, parsing, question answering, statistical NLP

Approximately 12 studentships from a variety of sources are availableto cover maintenance at the standard research council rate ofapproximately GBP 12.000 per year and tuition fees at the home/EU oroverseas rate.

Additionally 5 Marie Curie Fellowships for early stage researchersworking towards a PhD in the area of speech science and technology areavailable. For more details see http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/edsst/.

Applicants should have a good honours degree or equivalent incomputational linguistics, speech technology, cognitive science,computer science, or a related discipline.

For further information please contact Dr. Hiroshi Shimodaira(hshimoda@inf.ed.ac.uk). Application forms and details on how to applyare available from:
http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/apply.html

Application deadlines for entry in September 2006:
January 31, 2006 for overseas students
March 31, 2006 for UK and EU students

Applications received after these deadlines may be considered, butthis cannot be guaranteed.

For more information on CSTR, ICCS, and HCRC, please visit:
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/
http://www.hcrc.ed.ac.uk/
http://www.iccs.inf.ed.ac.uk/