Research Fellow in Facial Speech Encoding 

University of Nottingham

Reference SCI375315
Closing Date Saturday, 6th February 2016
Job Type Research
Department Psychology
Salary £28982 to £33574 per annum pro-rata depending on skills and experience. Fixed-term

Applications are invited for the above post to work with Professor Alan Johnston on an EPSRC “Transformational approaches to improving hearing aid technology” funded project investigating the relationship between facial movement and speech. The project forms part of a wider collaboration with Dr Jeremy Skipper and Professor Marty Sereno at UCL and Dr Jonathan Viventi (Duke University). The project as a whole has two main aims: to recover speech sounds from facial movement and to develop an oral electrotactile stimulator as a sensory substitution device. Current hearing aids are less effective in noisy social environments since they amplify speech-band noise as well as the speech signal. The project will used new methods for analysing facial motion to address this problem by providing a speech signal derived from facial movement. The main role of the Research Associate/fellow at Nottingham will be to implement this face to voice system. An additional RA will be appointed at UCL to fabricate a non-invasive conformable high-density electrode array to supplement hearing through electrotactile stimulation of the hard palate. The device is expected to have a high enough channel density to realistically simulate the spatial information about sound frequency available to the healthy cochlea. It is expected both RAs will collaborate effectively across the project. In addition there will be opportunities for MR measurements of the movement of the vocal tract and functional imaging of the brain centres activated by the sensory substitution device with Professor Sereno.

The successful candidate will be responsible for developing a system for mapping facial movement to speech. The duties will include computational modelling of facial movement, facial speech and audible speech capture and analysis and dynamic magnetic resonance imaging of sagittal sections of the vocal tract.

Candidates must have a PhD in cognitive science or a closely related area. They must have well developed programming skills and an understanding of high-level signal processing. Knowledge of the fields of face perception, speech perception and brain imaging, and experience with Linux and MATLAB, would be an advantage.

This post will be offered on a fixed-term contract for a period of two years in the first instance with the prospect of a third year at UCL depending upon progress and the requirements of the project as a whole.

Full time hours for research staff average 36.25 hours per week and times of work are as determined by the Head of Department.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to Professor Alan Johnston, tel: 0115 9515284 or email Alan.Johnston@nottingham.ac.uk. Please note that applications sent directly to this email address will not be accepted.



Professor Alan Johnston
School of Psychology
University Park
University of Nottingham
Nottingham
NG7 2RD
0115 95 15284
alan.johnston@nottingham.ac.uk





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