Available PhD scholarships

 

Interactive Digital Media ( Virtual Reality, Signal Processing)

PhD projects from external funding IDM: Emotion-based personalised digital media experience in Co-Spaces. The application is closed on the 30 of June 2009. The starting date January 2009.

 

Supervisor Asst. Prof. Olga Sourina   eosourina@ntu.edu.sg

Traditionally, EEG-based technology has been applied in medical applications. Now, new wireless headsets that meet consumer criteria for wearability, price, portability and ease-of-use are coming to the market. It makes possible to spread technology to applications in other areas such as entertainment, e-learning, virtual worlds, cyberworlds, etc. The student will work on mathematical model and algorithms of quantification of basic emotions and implementation of the feedback in 3D virtual collaborative spaces. Application of the algorithms in entertainment industry such as 3D collaborative environments and games, will be proposed.

Traditionally, EEG-based technology has been applied in medical applications. Now, new wireless headsets that meet consumer criteria for wearability, price, portability and ease-of-use are coming to the market. It makes possible to spread technology to applications in other areas such as entertainment, e-learning, virtual worlds, cyberworlds, etc. The student will work on mathematical model and algorithms of quantification of levels of the user’s engagement (from relax to concentration) and implementation of the feedback in 3D virtual spaces. Application of the algorithms in e-learning: educational games, and e-learning will be proposed.

Neurofeedback is a process of displaying involuntary physiological processes obtained by electronic instrumentation, and then learning to voluntarily influence those processes by making changes in condition. The main objective of the project is to enhance virtual reality with neurofeedback (seamlessness interaction). The student needs to develop mathematical model and algorithms of quantification of levels of the user’s engagement (from relax to excitement) and implement the feedback in 3D virtual spaces. Application of the algorithms in neurofeedback games will be proposed. Students who are interested in IDM are very welcome.

Bio-medical engineering

Supervisor Asst. Prof. Olga Sourina  eosourina@ntu.edu.sg

To develop novel mathematical models of psychosomatic interactions in humans.  Based on such a model, some practical recommendations on improving the psychological state in humans and /or interactive/VR software systems are to be developed to improve the general health conditions in different groups of humans.  The final deliverable of the project will be psycho-feedback methodology and algorithms that are to be tested on real patients.

Interactive Digital media

Supervisor Asst. Prof. Olga Sourina  eosourina@ntu.edu.sg

The computer graphics methods and techniques allow real-time interactive visualization and manipulation of 3-dimensional (3D) objects in virtual environment. The assembly of molecules in a 3D space or molecular docking is used for rational drug design. These techniques help the user to understand molecular interactions and to evaluate the design of pharmaceutical drugs. In recent years, besides the visualization techniques, there has been increasing interest in using haptic interfaces to facilitate the exploration and analysis of molecular docking. Haptic device could enable the users to manipulate the molecules and feel its interaction during the docking process in virtual laboratory or even in shared collaborative environment. In this project, novel methods and algorithms of visual and haptic rendering will be proposed and implemented in biomolecular docking system.

Bio-informatics

Supervisor Asst. Prof. Olga Sourina  eosourina@ntu.edu.sg

Bio-informatics is a rapid developing research area that has its roots both in biology and data mining. In bio-informatics, the goal of the scientists is to determine which of data is important and target that information. Using several different approaches against the same data set, one can generate biologically significant conclusions with a high degree of confidence. Molecular dynamics is one of the topics in DNA study. The aim of this project is to study the knowledge domain of molecular dynamics and propose geometric model and efficient algorithms for solving the problems of data mining time-dependent data.

Data Mining, Soft Computing

Supervisor Asst. Prof. Olga Sourina  eosourina@ntu.edu.sg

Cluster analysis divides data into groups of clusters in order to improve understanding or to find structure in data. In real applications, it is often the case when there is no sharp boundary between clusters, then the fuzzy clustering is more suited for the data. The objective of the project is to develop novel fuzzy clustering models to discover static clusters and study time-dependent clusters. In our model, we will consider the cases when objects could move from one cluster to another. The efficient algorithms for interactive clustering based on these models will be developed.

Significance and aims of proposed research topic

Fuzzy data mining is receiving wide interest in both academic and industrial worlds. Visualization offers an intuitive way of analysis that can help to discover data patterns and structures in data. The aim of the project is to develop geometric fuzzy clustering models and algorithms for knowledge discovery in engineering or/and bio-informatics data. The methods and algorithms to be developed and implemented as a system prototype will let the user to define and classify fuzzy clusters interactively with potential beneficiaries in areas such as engineering, bio-informatics, etc. It is expected that the system prototype will improve the exploration of scientific and engineering data allowing the user to discover the patterns that, otherwise, would remain hidden in data.