PhD in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews: Human-Computer Interaction
I work at the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, UK. Often we have PhD funding available for excellent and highly motivated students. If you are interested in pursuing a PhD in human-computer interaction (broadly interpreted) then feel free to contact me.
A succinct blurb about me and my research interests can be found on my faculty web page.
In general, I am interested in supervising a PhD that falls within one of the following broad areas:
- Social signal processing, context-aware user interfaces, ubiquitous computing
- Gesture/Kinect and touch-screen interaction
- Smart software design tools
- Visualisation of machine learning and other uncertain reasoning methods
- Intelligent interactive systems
- Text entry methods
- Crowdsourcing
- Accessible user interfaces
If you are interested, drop me an email on
pok@st-andrews.ac.uk and we can discuss an application.
My Research
Examples of recent research I am doing:
- Creating efficient and fluid pervasive and ubiquitous systems, such as new interaction techniques for wall-sized displays
- Creating better text input interfaces for disabled people with communication difficulties
- Creating new multimodal input techniques for mobile phones, tablets and unconventional devices
A couple of popular press accounts on my recent research can be found here and here. Click here for a full list of press coverage on my previously published research. A list of all my research publications can be found here.
About the Research Environment
We have a recently started the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction (SACHI) research group which consists of one professor and three lecturers. You can read more about our research group on this web page. Our research group covers human-computer interaction, pervasive and ubiquitous computing, mobile interaction, multimodal signal processing, privacy and security and perception and visualisation. We regularly publish research papers in the top venues in our fields (see my publications and our group publications) and we are very active in the research community. For instance, I am an Associate Chair at CHI 2012 (Human-Computer Interaction) and a Workshop Co-Chair at IUI 2012 (Intelligent User Interfaces), two major ACM conferences. We also have active collaborations with other research groups located in Scotland, UK, Europe and USA.
Our brand new HCI lab contains Kinects, a DiamondTouch table, a Microsoft surface, plenty of mobile devices of various brands and lots of other equipment. We also have a Tobii eye-tracker and are in the process of purchasing a full-body motion sensor, a new eye-tracker and a 3D printer. We have designated spaces for both in-situ and laboratory-based experiments.
St Andrews viewed from a nearby hiking trail
The School of Computer Science is a member of the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) and our research group in Human Computer Interaction is actively cooperating with the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow within the SICSA multimodal interaction theme.
The 600-year old world-renown University of St Andrews is completely integrated with the beautiful historic town of St Andrews, world-recognised as "the home of golf". The town is located north of Edinburgh at the east coast of Scotland. Despite its small size it has three sand beaches, seven golf courses, theatres, a cinema, world-class restaurants (including a Michelin star restaurant), and much more. It takes about an hour to travel to St Andrews via train from Edinburgh.
Check out this excellent photography website to get an idea of what the town looks like.