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Data Science Research Group - suggested PhD projects
Predicting Recovery from Stroke with Machine Learning
This PhD research would focus on interpretable machine learning applied to data acquired from stroke patients (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ploras/). This work will be with Professor Cathy Price (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL), whose (PLORAS) team has collected one of the largest data sets of stroke patients (greater than 1,000), including structural MRI scans, behaviour and demographics. A key focus of Cathy Price’s work is to predict the recovery trajectory of stroke patients from their structural MRI scans, particularly patients with language deficits (i.e. that are aphasic). Progress has been made on this using traditional and now deep learning methods.
Critical to clinical uptake of machine learning in this area is the ability to interpret the predictions it provides in a fashion that can be communicated to clinicians, patients and carers. The PhD student would work on this topic, using methods such as neural-symbolic techniques. The student will be located in the School of Computing at the University of Kent, but will regularly visit and work closely with Cathy Price’s team at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging. Expertise in machine learning will be provided by Dr Thomas Hope (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL) and Dr Marek Grzes (School of Computing, University of Kent).
Supervised by Professor Howard Bowman and Marek Grzes
Incorporating self-evaluation into computational creativity systems
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.
Supervised by Dr Anna Jordanous
Evaluating Computational Creativity
Computational creativity is the computational study of computer systems that can produce creative work or act creatively. Recent research has looked at how we can make such research more scientifically rigorous. In particular, how do we evaluate how creative these systems are? Various contributions (including my own) have been made in terms of methodologies for evaluation of creative systems; the time is ripe for comparing these methods in different domains. Students may wish to employ comparison metrics such as information-theoretic measures, statistical methods, relating the results to user evaluations and/or computational modelling in this research. It is expected that the PhD work will result in clear recommendations to the computational creativity research community about how to evaluate their systems, and contribute towards solving any issues not addressed by the fledgling existing methodologies that exist.
Supervised by Dr Anna Jordanous
Expressive musical performance software
Traditionally, when computational software performs music the performances can be criticised for being too unnatural, lacking interpretation and, in short, being too mechanical. However much progress has been made within the field of expressive musical performance and musical interpretation expression. Alongside these advances have been interesting findings in musical expectation (i.e. what people expect to hear when listening to a piece of music), as well as work on emotions that are present within music and on how information and meaning are conveyed in music. Each of these advances raises questions of how the relevant aspects could be interpreted by a musical performer. Potential application areas for computer systems that can perform music in an appropriately expressive manner include, for example, improving playback in music notation editors (like Sibelius), or the automated performance of music generated on-the-fly for 'hold' music (played when waiting on hold during phone calls). Practical work exploring this could involve writing software that performs existing pieces, or could be to write software that can improvise, interpreting incoming sound/music and generating an appropriate sonic/musical response to it in real time.
Supervised by Dr Anna Jordanous
Digital preservation of the information within musical/sonic material
Digital preservation of audio material raises many interesting questions to be investigated, including how to archive a sound, what metadata to keep, and future-proofing. Of particular interest is how to explore issues of retention of musical/sonic information from relevant digital audio material, for later access and analysis. Sound and music are typically very open to interpretation, with much information being conveyed through musical/sonic material. Music Information Retrieval (MIR) allows us to see what information is communicated by musical material, using techniques from Computing and Music. Typically MIR is applied to digital rather than physical materials and comes in a variety of forms that could be explored, such as using digital tools or computational analysis for informing and enhancing musicological analysis or musical interpretation. In this PhD project, the PhD candidate will carry out such explorations, towards the development of an archive or a methodology for existing archives to access and retrieve musical information from archive music-based data.
Supervised by Dr Anna Jordanous
Music on the Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a vision of the Web where items on the web are data, which get linked together if they are data referring to similar things. In the Semantic Web, "a computer program can learn enough about what the data means to process it." (Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 2000) There are some data and ontologies (computational models of knowledge) published on the Semantic Web about music, for example the Music Ontology (musicontology.com). Research is starting to emerge on using information retrieval in conjunction with data on the Semantic Web; this project proposes that the PhD candidate explores how Music Information Retrieval (MIR) can be enhanced using Semantic Web data and tools. During this PhD project, the candidate would look at a particular question in music information retrieval, such as how to use MIR to perform computational musicological analysis or how to identify music that is intended to express similar meanings or emotions. (Alternatively the candidate may wish to address a different music information retrieval problem, in an area of specific interest to them; this is welcome.) The PhD candidate would explore how this MIR question can be addressed by using music-specific Semantic Web data/models/technologies to enhance the process of identifying relevant information. It is expected that the PhD candidate will produce computational tools or software that engages directly with the Semantic Web in order to perform the musical information retrieval task. The performance of Semantic-Web enhanced solutions should be compared to traditional MIR solutions for that task, if any exist, and evaluated as to the accuracy and comprehensiveness with which the tools or software carry out the task.
Supervised by Dr Anna Jordanous
Treating Obesity with EEG
Obesity is one of the prime challenges facing in healthcare system with around 20% of the world’s population is affected by this. Obesity is considered as a complex syndrome in which psychological, genetic, environmental and physiological factors involved to develop the obese phenotype. Until now, health policies was ineffective at preventing the increase in obesity rates and this indicates the requirement of developing an effective intervention at individual and population level. There are different arguments regarding the concept of food craving with one view consider food addiction as a social phenotype that is commonly seen in a group of people with obesity which is similar to drug addiction and others think obesity as a result of food addiction with some foods are contain addictive ingredients such as salt, sugar and fat etc. Studies about craving changes in brain were examined by cue response techniques and these activities was identified in caudate, insula and hippocampus. These three parts are reported to be aiding the common substrate hypothesis for drug and food craving. The objective of this research is to use EEG and signal processing to treat obesity.
Supervised by Dr Palaniappan Ramaswamy
Improving attention with sounds
There is much information on the Internet on how sounds can influence and help with concentration. But not much conclusive information on the effects of such sounds has been found, and there is a possibility that the use of these sounds to manipulate the brain is merely an urban myth. As people find themselves easily distracted, these sounds become a form of alternative treatment for them, and it is thus important to investigate these sounds and to what extent they have the intended effects on concentration. This project will study this aim using EEG.
Supervised by Dr Palaniappan Ramaswamy
Stress management
The fundamental aspect of human experience is awareness. Combined with the ability to think, imagine and understand it results into the beautiful cosmic play we experience. However, with it comes along a multitude of problems, often illusory in nature – such as stress, anxiety, anger, negativity, etc. It is isn't hard to guess that in such states our behaviour is significantly altered, usually in harmful ways for both – us and the environment. There are techniques such as meditation, music, humour which can help us come back to our “real” senses and feel happier/peaceful again. So the fundamental enquiry would be about what sort of things do help us achieve a happier state, and moreover what's their impact on both short term and long term brain functioning. This project will study this aim using EEG.
Supervised by Dr Palaniappan Ramaswamy
Pocket brain-computer interface design for device control
The project will investigate novel algorithms and stimuli design for a practical, real-time and portable brain-computer interface (BCI) design for device control. It will involve electroencephalogram (EEG) data collection using available equipment from volunteers and the analysis will be carried out initially using Matlab software to allow some form of device control. Next, the feasibility of implementing the complete framework in a portable device will be explored. Therefore, familiarity with Matlab and portable device programming (such as Android) will be necessary. Understanding of basic signal processing concepts such as filtering and spectral analysis will be required. In addition, electronic component development skills will be desirable. Knowledge of neural mechanisms and data collection experience will be useful but not mandatory.
Supervised by Dr Palaniappan Ramaswamy