Steve Cassidy

I have a PhD scholarship available for a project in applying Semantic Web technologies (RDF, Sparql, Annotea) to the Linguistic Annotation problem. Here’s an outline:

Shared collaborative distributed annotation using semantic web technologies.

The Semantic Web augments the current Web with machine-processable information enabling humans and machines to work in cooperation; in our context, we are using it as the basis of a linguistic annotation system that is used by language researchers to annotate language resources. This project will look at the issues raised when we allow many people to collaborate on authoring these annotations and making shared annotations available to a community of researchers. This crosses a number of existing areas of research including the semantic web and social computing, and extends the range of interactions available to researchers over the web.

Of course, as usual there is scope for variation on this theme, if you’re interested in this problem space and want to pursue a PhD in Australia, please get in touch. The scholarship is open to Australians and International students.

This is a potential project idea for an Honours or Masters student. It might also form the core of a PhD project.

I have an ongoing project looking at processing speech recorded in meeting rooms. There are a number of student projects which could be built around this data. Here are some possible projects suitable for Honours

• Tracking speakers through a series of meetings. Given a series of meetings with a stable but changing group of people, we would like to model the speakers in the meetings and for any meeting decide who is present and mark their speech turns. This would involve working with audio signals and building speaker models as well as working with the results of an existing speech segmentation system.
• Integrating multiple microphone signals to improve speaker segmentation. This will involve quite a bit of low level audio processing so would be suitable for someone who had an interest in numerical algorithms. There is some existing code to build upon so you wouldn’t be starting from scratch.