A Postdoctoral Research Fellow position is available within the EPSRC-funded project “Trajectories of Depression: Investigating the Correlation between Human Mobility Patterns and Mental Health Problems by means of Smartphones” project at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

The goal of this project is to investigate how mobile phones can be used to collect and analyse mobility patterns of individuals in order to understand how mental health problems affect their daily routines and behaviour and how potential changes can be automatically detected. In particular, mobility patterns and levels of activity can be quantitatively measured by means of mobile phones, exploiting the GPS receiver and the accelerometers embedded in the devices. The data can be extremely helpful to understand the behaviour of a depressed person, and in particular, to detect potential changes in his or her behaviour, which might be linked to a worsening depressive state. By monitoring this information in real-time, health officers and charity workers might intervene by means of digital behaviour intervention delivered through mobile phones or by means of traditional methods such as by inviting the person for a meeting or by calling him or her by phone.

In order to support these novel applications, it is necessary to build mathematical tools for analysing the mobility traces in real-time for the detection of gradual or sudden changes related to the emotional states of the individual. More specifically, we plan to devise analytical techniques for studying the relationships between human mobility patterns and emotional states. We plan to use existing datasets of human mobility and to collect data by means of a smartphone application distributed to people affected by depression.

This is an exciting opportunity for conducting ground-breaking interdisciplinary research at the interface of ubiquitous computing, mobile sensing, large-scale data mining and machine learning.

To apply you should hold a PhD in Computer Science or other relevant disciplines (or should be very close to completion of your PhD programme). Also, you should have demonstrated your research competence through high-quality and high-impact publications in top conferences and journals in one (or more) of the following areas: ubiquitous computing, mobile systems, large-scale data mining and/or machine learning.

Informal enquiries may be made to Dr Mirco Musolesi (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~musolesm/) at the School of Computer Science.

Closing date: 15th January 2014

Post is available for 12 Months in the first instance

The interviews will take place in the second part of January.

Expected start date: February/March 2014 (or immediately thereafter).


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Mirco Musolesi
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham
Edgbaston B15 2TT Birmingham, United Kingdom
Web: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~musolesm

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