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 2023, 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 6 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.

  • Video Object Segmentations – semantic or instance segmentations
  • Audio-visual fine-grained action recognition, localisation or retrieval
  • Action Generalisation/Adaptation
  • Problems using EPIC-KITCHENS or Ego4D datasets

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 for 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.

  • Video Corpus Moment Retrieval
  • Episodic Memory for querying long form videos

Zahraa S. Abdallah: Assistant Professor 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

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 2021, and should still be PhD students by the end of the internship - I.e. PhD end time on or after Oct 2023.
  • 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

During your research visit, you will be supervised by your selected faculty member, and integrated within their research group. You will have access to our excellent resource of GPUs (Blue Crystal 4) to run any experiments, a university of bristol email account with access to our PGR resources and a desk allocated for the duration of your visit.

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: 13 Jan 2023
Decisions Announced: 10 Feb 2023 [students should accept offers within 1 week of receipt]
MaVi-RV research start date: Between 15 June and 2 July 2023