Machine Learning for Vision and Language Understanding
Primary supervisor
Additional information
Contact admissions office
Other projects with the same supervisor
- Ontology Informed Machine Learning for Computer Vision
- Controlled Synthesis of Virtual Patient Populations with Multimodal Representation Learning
- Trustworthy Multi-source Learning (2025 entry onward)
- Representation Learning and Its Applications
Funding
- Competition Funded Project (Students Worldwide)
This research project is one of a number of projects at this institution. It is in competition for funding with one or more of these projects. Usually the project which receives the best applicant will be awarded the funding. Applications for this project are welcome from suitably qualified candidates worldwide. Funding may only be available to a limited set of nationalities and you should read the full department and project details for further information.
Project description
This project invites PhD candidates who are interested in the fields of machine learning, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. The broad aim will be
(1) to develop advanced mathematical modelling and large-scale optimisation techniques, to simulate human intelligence for solving complex tasks, such as matching, recognition, relation extraction, or text/image understanding, etc.,
and/or
(2) establish theoretical understanding of the success/limitation/behaviour of machine learning models.
The developed techniques will be simulated on real-world tasks for practical AI solution provision and data analytics. The tasks that my current and past PhD students/Postdocs have worked include
* Visual relation extraction, e.g., human-object interaction recognition.
* Image classification, e.g., fine-grained, hierarchical.
* Sentiment analysis.
* Image/video retrieval.
* Speech/text based emotion recognition.
* Text information retrieval and summarization...
One theoretical aspect that I am currently working with my PhD students is adversarial robustness. You are welcome to select from the above list or bring your own tasks of interest. Your research will be motivated by aspects like (1) reduce the use of label information, (2) improve model explainability, and/or (3) improve generalisation and robustness.
We will consider applicants who have:
* Very strong interest in the above research fields.
* An excellent undergraduate degree in Computer Science or Mathematics (or related discipline), and preferably, a relevant M.Sc. degree.
* Very good experience with computer programming of mathematical models and algorithms (in Python or Matlab, or other platforms).
* Excellent report writing and presentation skills.
* Excellent ability to communicate with fellow students and colleagues.
Please, note that applicants are preferably to have a first-class (or an equivalent international qualification) degree, and must additionally satisfy the standard requirements for postgraduate studies at the University of Manchester, such as English language qualifications, as stated in the PGR guidelines.
Qualified applicants are strongly encouraged to informally contact the supervising academic Dr. Tingting Mu (tingting.mu@manchester.ac.uk) to discuss the application and possible research titles prior to applying.
Person specification
For information
- Candidates must hold a minimum of an upper Second Class UK Honours degree or international equivalent in a relevant science or engineering discipline.
- Candidates must meet the School's minimum English Language requirement.
- Candidates will be expected to comply with the University's policies and practices of equality, diversity and inclusion.
Essential
Applicants will be required to evidence the following skills and qualifications.
- You must be capable of performing at a very high level.
- You must have a self-driven interest in uncovering and solving unknown problems and be able to work hard and creatively without constant supervision.
Desirable
Applicants will be required to evidence the following skills and qualifications.
- You will have good time management.
- You will possess determination (which is often more important than qualifications) although you'll need a good amount of both.
General
Applicants will be required to address the following.
- Comment on your transcript/predicted degree marks, outlining both strong and weak points.
- Discuss your final year Undergraduate project work - and if appropriate your MSc project work.
- How well does your previous study prepare you for undertaking Postgraduate Research?
- Why do you believe you are suitable for doing Postgraduate Research?