2 PhD positions in IAD - Next generation (sports) entertainment systems

Simula Research Laboratory conducts basic research in the fields of communication technology, scientific computing and software engineering. The aim is to carry out research of the highest quality, educate graduate university students and create new businesses. The research will focus on fundamental scientific problems with a large potential for important applications in society. The PhD candidates will be enrolled in the PhD-programme of Simula School of Research and Innovation. Education will be delivered in partnership with the industry and the universities in Norway. Simula will actively support, and create the conditions necessary for the establishment of businesses based on the research it conducts. The PhD degrees will be awarded by the University of Oslo.

The 2 candidates will work in area of system support for video streaming and search. Examples of research areas include:

1. Personalized multi-view video delivery

This topic relates to delivery of multiple (selectable) video streams produced at events like in a sports scenario. For example, there are several cameras capturing for example soccer, American football, hockey, baseball and basket ball games. In current broadcasting or on-Demand systems, the content of a stream transmitted to a user is determined by a producer, but there should be nothing to prevent the user to make this selection by himself (or looking at a replay several times from different angles) or integrating it with the content produced by a friend publishing his mobile-phone captured video live in a social network.  One could also imagine syntetic views generated based on multiple-capera imputs. In this scenario, we will look at such enhanced functionality from a systems perspective. What will it mean in terms of required resources, how to make such a system scale,...?

As an extension of this, while attending a live happening, it is often desirable to view an exiting event (like a goal or a free kick) in a replay - possible from different angles and multiple times. Today, the users are limited by the big screens (if present), hardly seen by some of the attendees, which content are determined by a single producer. In this project, we will investigate such an application from the system perspective and identify and try to solve the challenges of supporting 1000s of spectators replaying events to their mobile devices, i.e., looking at resource utilization, scalability, etc.

2. Improving search and recommendations of sports videos

Video search is often based on annotations of the video, but a question is which range of the video clip should be retrieved as a results of a search, for example, when the goal is scored at a certain time. How long time in advance should you start playing the video and when should you stop? This varies from clip to clip and it is hart for the machine to determine this. However, in a recommender system, the video playout of users could be tracked (e.g., jumping to a position before the current start point) and submitted back to the search engine to adjust the time interval for a certain event giving a more precise video clip interval in the next search for this event. Again, we would like to look at this from a system perspective to see how this can be performed, how to take the automatic user feedback into account in the search engine, etc.

3. Scaling and distributing multimedia indexing

The time between producing content and until it is searchable might be large. Here, we would like to look at how such tasks can be parallelized and distributed. One example is to scale/increase performance in terms of latency of the indexing part of a soccer scenario - i.e., reducing the time between the content is produced and delivered, and the time when it is searchable -- e.g., by distributing and optimizing the operations.

For PhD student positions, there is a strictly enforced formal grade requirement (using the grading system of the Bologna agreement) given by Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Oslo:

1. Bachelor degree grades must have an average grade of C or better
2. Master degree grades must have an average grade of B or better
3. The Master thesis must be graded to B or better

We strongly prefer electronic applications. If we need certified paper copies, we will get back to you. Send PDF versions if at all possible. This is the required material:

• Your cover letter. State clearly the project and position that you are interested in, don't forget reference numbers if such are necessary (see below). We would like to read about your research interests and their relation to the topics of the position.
• Curriculum vitae, including:
• Your name (given, family), data of birth, nationality, sex, current address, phone number and email address.
• Your highest degree's name, educational institution, department and year of completion.
• List of your higher education including type of education, place, duration, and degree if applicable.
• List of your employments, including company/institution name and duration.
• Your publication list.
• Your master thesis. Applicants who are not finished yet should include a draft.
  
• Certificates for all university level degrees.
• Official grade sheets for all courses taken at the university level. In an integrated grade sheet, indicate the grades that were included in the bachelor and master educations, respectively.
• For applicants for a PhD-student position with any university education outside Norway: official description of the grading system of every university-level institution, including an official mapping of grades either to the European credit system according to the Bologna agreement, or an official translation of the grading scale to a scale based on the percentage of successful participants.
• For applicants for a PhD-student position with any university education outside the University of Oslo: official course descriptions or URLs for official course descriptions for all courses at the master level and above.
• Any reference letter that you consider appropriate.

Successful candidates also satisfy the following requirements:

• Good ability to cooperate with others
• Good ability to work independently on challenging problems
• Good English skills

Pay grade: Ltr. 45-51 (353 000 - 391 500) NKR (Norwegian LTR scale, depending on qualifications)

Application deadline : 19th of May 2009

Please email applications with attached CVs to jobs@simula.no.  

Important: The subject field of your email must include 0922 PhD IAD or reference number 2009/6924

Further details can be found at:

http://www.admin.uio.no/opa/ledige-stillinger/2009/vitenskapelige/2PhDInformatics-2009-6924.html