Applications are invited for a PhD scholarship at the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand. These are exciting opportunities for world-class research training within a successful and enthusiastic team of researchers, in new and well-equipped laboratories. The team has productive collaborations with industrial and university groups across the globe.
The projects aim to develop various new signal-processing algorithms to process single and multi-channel audio signals. The algorithms will often have other applications as well. A number of research topics will be available. We list two examples. The distributed blind source separation project has as goal to make an arbitrary number of sensors collaborate for the purpose of separating source signals (music instruments or talkers in the case of audio signals) without the need for transmitting unprocessed sensor observations to a central fusion center. This will result in unlimited scalability and should make blind source separation useful for many new applications. The low-delay audio coding project has as objective to improve low-rate audio coding by exploiting the newly developed distribution-preserving quantization paradigm and to find an approach that minimizes the impact of severe delay constraints. The resulting algorithm will be useful for internet jamming, in-ear monitoring of a live performance, and for hearing aids with a wireless link to television or radio.
The candidate should hold a Masters degree in Mathematics or Engineering, and must have a strong mathematical and statistical background, as well as an interest in applying this mathematics to the construction of practical algorithms. For some projects, the candidate should also have practical skills required for the construction of experiments.
The three year PhD scholarship provides a tax-free stipend of NZ$25,000 per annum as well as covering the cost of fees, projects costs and conference travel.
The positions will remain available until suitable candidates have been found.
For more information on VUW and the School of Engineering and Computer Science and its research activity, please visit www.victoria.ac.nz/ecs/default.aspx
Information on how to apply, and the application form, can be found at www.victoria.ac.nz/fgr/prospective-phds/applying.aspx. Applications should preferably, but not necessarily, fit the regular Victoria application deadlines.
For more information contact Prof. Bastiaan kleijn: http://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/Main/BastiaanKleijn; bastiaan.kleijn@ecs.vuw.ac.nz