Fully Funded Swansea and No More Marking Ltd PhD Scholarship: Elevating Comparative Judgement Using a Large-Scale Human-In-The-Loop Bayesian Active Learning Approach (ECSTATIC)

Funding providers: Swansea University's Faculty of Science and Engineering and No More Marking Ltd

Subject areas: Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence, Optimisation, and Decision-Making

Project start date: 

• 1 October 2024 (Enrolment open from mid-September)

Project description: 

The Comparative Judgment (CJ) method, which has gained traction in UK schools over the past decade, involves assessors choosing the superior submission from a pair, rather than assigning a score to each one. This approach is less taxing for assessors and maintains accuracy for a small number of submissions. Recently, we developed a Bayesian active learning approach for CJ (BCJ; https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13292), to solve a crucial problem of interaction-efficient pair selection while producing reliable estimations of ranks and predictive uncertainty.  

In this related project, for the first time, we will aim to scale BCJ to handle thousands of items (as opposed to tens of them), enabling ranking and scoring across schools and assignments. We will propose new methods to dynamically incorporate new items for ranking in BCJ in an interaction-efficient manner, and devise avenues for providing individual learners insight into their progress over time compared to their peers. We will evaluate these methods to establish their efficacy in helping assessors make informed decisions under uncertainty arising from the practical paucity of data and interactions, as well as better informing learners. These methods will be designed in collaboration with assessors and learners to ensure that they remain relevant and useful beyond the project completion. 

Eligibility

Candidates must hold an Upper Second Class (2.1) honours degree or an appropriate master’s degree with a minimum overall grade at ‘Merit’ in Computer Science, Mathematics or a closely related discipline. If you are eligible to apply for the scholarship (i.e. a student who is eligible to pay the UK rate of tuition fees) but do not hold a UK degree, you can check our comparison entry. Please note that you may need to provide evidence of your English Language proficiency.

English Language: IELTS 6.5 Overall (with no individual component below 6.0) or Swansea University recognised equivalent.

This scholarship is open to candidates of any nationality.

Please visit our website for more information on eligibility.

Additional Funding Information 

This scholarship covers the full cost of tuition fees and an annual stipend at £19,237.

Additional research expenses will also be available.

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