Fully funded PhD in Artificial Intelligence applied to Animal-Computer Interaction

A PhD studentship funded by Pet Plan Charitable Trust has become available at The Open University, to work on a project within the field of Animal-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. The project will support the work of bio-detection dogs trained for cancer detection. The successful candidate is expected to start between October 2025 and will be funded for three years. The studentship is open to both UK and international students, although the successful candidate will be expect to be resident in Milton Keynes for the duration of the project.

A Communication System for Bio-Detection Dogs to Inform the Development of Diagnostic Bio-Electronic Sensors

PROJECT SUMMARY

This project is a collaboration between The Open University’s Animal-Computer Interaction Lab and UK Charity Medical Detection Dogs, in the field of Artificial Intelligence applied to Animal-Computer Interaction. The project is grounded in prior research (see references below) and aims to support the development of a canine bio-detection approach for human disease diagnostics. Bio-detection with dogs has demonstrable potential for early disease diagnostics but it also still presents important limitations. The successful student will take an animal-centred interaction approach to unlock the potential of bio-detection with dogs. You will bring together sensor data sources and machine learning methods to detect, interpret and model the nuances of dogs’ olfactory stimulus response to biological compounds. This has the potential to lead to significant improvements in the early, non-invasive, safe, fast and inexpensive diagnosis of medical conditions, such as cancer. This work is expected to expedite the development of effective bio-electronic sensors for large-scale diagnostics and inform strategies for the treatment of aggressive cancers, with a particular focus on colorectal cancer as a case study.

REFERENCES

• Withington, Lucy; Diaz Pardo de Vera, David; Guest, Claire; Mancini, Clara and Piwek, Paul (2021). Artificial Neural Networks for classifying the time series sensor data generated by medical detection dogs. Expert Systems with Applications, 184, article no. 115564. https://oro.open.ac.uk/78167/ 
   
• Johnston-Wilder, Olivia; Mancini, Clara; Aengenheister, Brendan; Mills, Joe; Harris, Rob and Guest, Claire (2015). Sensing the Shape of Canine Responses to Cancer. In: ACE '15: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, article no. 63. https://oro.open.ac.uk/48577/ 
   
• Mancini, Clara; Harris, Rob; Aengenheister, Brendan and Guest, Claire (2015). Re-centering multispecies practices: a canine interface for cancer detection dogs. In: CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press, pp. 2673–2682. https://oro.open.ac.uk/42640/