Learn more about Summer of Research @Bristol from the Previous Visiting Research Students

The MaVi Research Visits (MaVi-RV) program provides an opportunity for high calibre PGR students to spend 3 months at the University of Bristol collaborating with our MaVi researchers and faculty members. This document details the faculty open for visitors in the summer of 2025, eligibility and conditions for the scheme.

Importantly, this program only provides registration fees for candidates. Any travel, visa or accommodation fees should be provided by your own institution. Please check with your advisor before applying.

Applications are particularly encouraged from ELLIS PhD students who can use the ELLIS program funds to cover their travel and accommodation expenses.

What do we do?

You can join the group of any of the 9 academics below. Each academic has offered a number of topics they are recruiting into.

Dima Damen: Professor of Computer Vision with research interests in egocentric vision, video understanding and fine-grained action understanding.

  • Egocentric Videos in 3D
  • Long-Term Tracking of Hand-Held Objects
  • Fine-Grained Video Descriptions
  • Audio-visual Action Recognition
  • Counting Repeated Actions in Video

Peter Flach: Professor of Artificial intelligence with research interests in evaluation and improvement of machine learning models, mining highly structured data, and human-centred AI.

  • Classifier calibration
  • Uncertainty representation and propagation
  • Knowledge-intensive AI
  • Explainability and interpretability

Majid Mirmehdi: Professor of Computer Vision with research interests in human and animal behaviour understanding and medical image/volume analysis

  • Human action understanding and assessment, e.g. in healthcare for action quality scores
  • Animal action analysis and understanding using camera-trap, drone or other footage
  • Segmentation, Classification, and Prediction in medical images and volumes

Raul Santos-Rodriguez: Associate Professor in Data Science and AI with research interests in the foundations of (human-centric) machine learning and its applications to healthcare and climate science.

  • Explainability, transparency and fairness
  • Weakly supervised learning
  • Human visual perception in machine learning
  • Human/agent interaction and collaboration

Michael Wray: Assistant Professor of Computer Vision with research interests in video understanding and Natural Language Processing.

  • Understanding Biases in Vision Language Models
  • Video Moment Retrieval and Video Corpus Moment Retrieval for Long Videos
  • Fine-grained Vision-Language Retrieval
  • Compositionality for Video-Language models

Zahraa S. Abdallah: Senior Lecturer in Data science and Machine Learning with research interest in time series and its healthcare applications and learning from multiple modalities.

  • Time series analysis (classification, clustering, explainability)
  • Adaptive and active learning
  • Genomic data analysis e.g., protein analysis for early detection of cancer
  • Data fusion and multi-modalities for combining various types of data sources

Telmo Silva Filho: Senior Lecturer in Data Science with research interests in evaluation of machine learning models, explainability, latent-variable models, and medical applications of computer vision.

  • Explainable evaluation, i.e. when/why is a model expected to fail?
  • Latent-variable models for evaluation
  • Segmentation and synthetic generation of medical images

Tilo Burghardt: Associate Professor in Computer Science with research interests in animal biometrics, imageomics and applications of computer vision to animal welfare, farming, and conservation

  • Deep learning for the detection of animal species, individuals, and morphological traits
  • Recognition of animal poses, behaviours, and social configurations
  • Integration of methods in computer vision, taxonomics, genetics, and ecology
  • Autonomous visual navigation of conservation drones and related robotic platforms

Guosheng Hu: Senior Lecturer in Computer Science with research interests in computer vision and model acceleration.

  • Accelerating Foundation Models (e.g., Large Language Models) through Quantisation, Pruning, Knowledge Distillation, etc.
  • Applications of Foundation Models
  • Multimodal Learning
  • Face and Body Analysis

Who can apply?

Applicants are invited from any country as long as they satisfy the eligibility criteria below:

  • Applicant is current PhD student, working towards their degree. Applicants are invited for students in their second year - I.e. PhD start time on or before Oct 2022, and should still be PhD students by the end of the internship - I.e. PhD end time on or after Oct 2025.
  • Applicant should have already published in top-tier conferences before applying for this internship.
  • Applicant should have prior knowledge/expertise in the internship topic they are applying for. The internship is expected to discuss an advanced topic and is not a training exercise for new researchers in the field.
  • Applicant should have the approval of their advisor before applying for this opportunity.
  • Applicant should provide evidence of their English language qualification, based on the university of Bristol E-profile for PhD students. Students currently studying in an English-speaking country or institution can be exempt from this requirement with evidence provided.

What do we offer?

Applicants will be selected based on their academic excellence, previous experiences and provided references. We have a limited number of 10 positions throughout the program annually

You are expected to be in Bristol for the majority of your visit's duration. During your research visit, you will be supervised by your selected faculty member, and integrated within their research group.

Additionally, you will have opportunities to present your work and attend talks by the various MaVi researchers. A social program over weekends will give you the opportunity to explore Bristol and its surroundings, guided by one of our friendly PGR students. Note that any expenses for the social activities are not covered by the program. Note that you need to bring your own laptop – machines will not be provided as part of the program.

What are the important dates?

Application Deadline: 20 Jan 2025
Decisions Announced: 20 Feb 2025 [students should accept offers within 1 week of receipt]
MaVi-RV research start date: Between 6 May and 15 July 2025