PhD studentship in UK "Linking Nature to Databases with your Smartphone"

Fully funded PhD studentship opportunity at The Open University, UK, on

   Linking nature to databases with your smartphone

in the context of an OpenScience Laboratory that will provide students
and the public with opportunities to carry out science experiments and
observations online.

You will research and develop analysis tools that recognise natural
objects that your smartphone sees, e.g., rocks, plants, butterflies, etc.

Imagine you collect rock samples during a field trip, from which you hope
to learn about geological formations millions of years ago. Your next step
is to take a photograph with your smart-phone and upload it into your
analysis tool that extracts relevant colour histograms and texture
features. These return a group of possible rock sample matches from a
pre-indexed image database. You are now able to use the known properties
of these rocks to validate or challenge prevailing theories of formations
based on your very own observations. This mechanism provides a link from a
physical object, here the rock sample, to the database world of knowledge
about rock samples via pressing the shutter on a smartphone and
intelligent data processing. This PhD project will explore and research
the underlying paradigm of indexing sensor data by suitable summary
statistics and how this mechanism can be used to access scientific
databases without the help of the traditional method classification
schemes. The work will be carried out within the Multimedia and
Information Systems research area of the OU's Knowledge Media Institute.
kmi.open.ac.uk

Interested? Please see 

  http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/openscience/?page_id=79

for an application.

--
Stefan Rüger                          s.rueger@open.ac.uk
Knowledge Media Institute           tel: +44-1908-655 945
The Open University                 fax: +44-1908-653 169
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK      http://kmi.open.ac.uk/mmis

-- 
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).

Received on Tuesday, 17 July 2012 16:34:01 UTC