{"id":262,"date":"2023-05-16T10:29:01","date_gmt":"2023-05-16T09:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/?p=262"},"modified":"2023-05-16T11:13:07","modified_gmt":"2023-05-16T10:13:07","slug":"looking-for-phd-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/?p=262","title":{"rendered":"Looking for PhD students!"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>We&#8217;re looking to find PhD students for a variety of insect tracking projects. Funding available!!<\/div>\n<div>\n<figure id=\"attachment_289\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-289\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-289\" src=\"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Fuye5-XX0AARWuG-300x140.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"140\" srcset=\"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Fuye5-XX0AARWuG-300x140.jpeg 300w, http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Fuye5-XX0AARWuG-768x357.jpeg 768w, http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Fuye5-XX0AARWuG.jpeg 1000w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-289\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tracking a bumblebee&#8217;s learning flight at Exeter university&#8217;s field site.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<div><strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n<div><em><strong>Bee Tracking (using retroreflective tags)<\/strong><br \/>\n<\/em><b><\/b>I&#8217;m working with a few research groups on this, but the main two groups are Natalie Hempel de Ibarra (Exeter) and Andrew Philippides (Sussex), who we&#8217;re applying for funding with.<\/div>\n<div>The parts the Sheffield team would be working on are the development of novel methods:<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>3d flight path reconstruction<\/li>\n<li>finding the bee&#8217;s orientation using specially devised tags<\/li>\n<li>unique labels<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The amount of hardware, coding, maths and fieldwork involved can be adjusted depending on what you would find the most interesting! To give a flavour of the maths: We use doubly stochastic variational inference to find the path of the bee. We use a raspberry pi and a custom 3d printed unit to house the tracking system, and a web interface to control it, in the field. [the initial development of the hardware basis for this is <a href=\"https:\/\/besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/epdf\/10.1111\/2041-210X.13699\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" data-saferedirecturl=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/epdf\/10.1111\/2041-210X.13699&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1673114223386000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3O4elJuF-_wy7nUw9K1nGJ\">described in my earlier paper<\/a>, but this paper doesn&#8217;t cover the stuff we&#8217;re working on now].<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m also working with other groups who are using this tech for other insects (dragonflies etc).<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Bee Tracking (using bluetooth)<br \/>\n<\/em><\/strong>I&#8217;m also about to put together a funding app with a collaborator in electrical engineering: The plan is to track bees (and other central-place foragers) using a bluetooth chip and tiny battery&#8230; again this will need a bit of maths etc, to get it working, happy to explain and discuss more :).<\/p>\n<div><strong><em>Another insect tracking PhD position<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div>Another related, funded PhD position with Michael Mangan is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jobs.ac.uk\/job\/CZI934\/phd-studentship-using-computer-vision-and-machine-learning-to-revolutionise-our-understanding-of-insect-behaviour\">here<\/a> &#8211; feel free to email me, or Dr. Mangan if you have any questions about the role. Michael Mangan is particularly interested in &#8220;In-field tracking of fruitflies&#8221; &#8211; as this is currently not possible and would support a lot of research<\/div>\n<div><em>\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n<div><em><strong>Summary<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/em>If you&#8217;re interested in applying for the funding to work on any of these projects, or want to discuss them further, please email me: <a href=\"mailto:m.t.smith@sheffield.ac.uk\">m.t.smith@sheffield.ac.uk<\/a>.<\/div>\n<div><strong>\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n<div><strong>PS <\/strong><em><strong>Another research area: Air Pollution<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<div>The other large project I&#8217;m working on is with collaborators at Manchester (Mauricio Alvarez) and Nottingham (Richard Wilkinson, Chris Lanyon), trying to model the source of air pollution (given a set of sensor measurements and information about the wind, diffusion, etc). This is more maths related than the bee-tracking one. Here&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/openreview.net\/pdf?id=G8BExMno316\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" data-saferedirecturl=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/openreview.net\/pdf?id%3DG8BExMno316&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1673114223386000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0WG4uEO6r8IVjfzTNK502J\">a link to the first paper<\/a> we published on the topic. There are different paths a PhD could go down:<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>practical: applying this to larger and more complex datasets [e.g. continent scale particulate pollution etc] &#8211; in the future this is particularly important when countries start to try to inventory their fossil CO2 emissions.<\/li>\n<li>mathematical: constraining the model (solving the problem of non-identifiability), non-linear modelling, etc.<\/li>\n<li>multiple outputs and multiple scales (from street scale to continental scale, etc).<\/li>\n<li>developing higher resolution maps of cities (e.g. by combining surface roughness maps with our advection diffusion model).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;re looking to find PhD students for a variety of insect tracking projects. Funding available!! \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Bee Tracking (using retroreflective tags) I&#8217;m working with a few research groups on this, but the main two groups are Natalie Hempel de Ibarra (Exeter) and Andrew Philippides (Sussex), who we&#8217;re applying for funding with. The parts the Sheffield &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/?p=262\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Looking for PhD students!&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=262"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290,"href":"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions\/290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaeltsmith.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}