Research Associate - Emote VR Voicer Project

The School of Digital Arts is a purpose built, interdisciplinary school at one of the UK's leading universities. Offering industry and research informed courses and specialist spaces with the latest technologies. The School of Digital Arts is a proud part of Manchester Metropolitan University. We build on the creative, science, tech and business strengths of a university whose research is rated as ‘world-leading' and is changing the way we live, work, learn and play.

Working within the School of Digital Arts (SODA) you will join state-of-the-art research on the AHRC funded Emote VR Voicer project, to develop new intelligently responsive VR apps that incorporate speech recognition and meaning classification. You will help create a system that can detect live emotional content in the spoken (or sung) word, mapping this to visual animations based on sample banks of 3D artworks.

AI systems are increasingly able to detect a speaker's emotions, leading to a new affective channel that can be explored in art. The controls available in standard Virtual Reality (VR) can be supplemented with speech recognition, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis. We aim to embody this potential in the front end of a new audiovisual interface, which would translate detected meanings of utterances to the morphing of abstract 3D animated shapes, enabling a radical new aesthetic experience.

About the role:

You will be working closely with the project team consisting of voice specialists, artists and AI researchers in an iterative development cycle. Your programming skills will be utilised to develop VR interfaces that use AI to detect and tag emotional meaning from audio, generating real-time visuals. Image synthesis, procedural content generation and style transfer will further expand on a bank of 3D graphics that will be created specifically for this project.

The job will be for 2.5 days per week (0.5 FT) on a fixed-term basis for two and a half years. The working pattern will be hybrid with some on-campus and some remote working possible.

About you:

Key skills:

• A good understanding of programming within one or both of the standard game engines Unreal and Unity using C++ and C# respectively, Python for machine learning, and experience with VR application development.

Essential skills and experience:

• A PhD in computer science, software engineering or a similar technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Experience developing projects with C++ and/or C# and Python
• Experience with machine learning and AI, e.g. transformers, GANs, contrastive learning (CLIP/CLAP)
• Hands-on experience developing Metaverse/VR applications using Unity and/or Unreal Engine.
• Experience with image and/or audio based projects
• Experience with data backup systems
• Experience with working in interdisciplinary teams
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
• Creative problem-solving skills
• Self-motivation and capable of independent research 

Desirable:

• Experience with libraries such as: SciPy, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers
• Experience with Image and/or audio-based AI development
• Familiarity with research projects productivity timelines
• Knowledge of the peer review process 

To apply, please submit your CV and Covering Letter via our application portal.  If you would like to discuss the role, please email Adinda at: A.vant.Klooster@mmu.ac.uk

Manchester Met University is committed to creating an intentionally inclusive culture of belonging that promotes equity and celebrates diversity. We understand the importance of having a diverse workforce and the benefits it can bring to ensuring diversity of thought and innovation in everything we do.

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