PhD Studentship: Machine Vision and AI for Automated Recognition of Animal Emotions

Start date 1 October 2026

This is one of several fully funded PhD studentships available within the College of Arts, Technology and Environment (CATE) at UWE Bristol.

The closing date for applications is 12^th June 2026, and the expected start date of these studentships is 1^st October 2026.

Although many doctoral projects are being advertised across the College, CATE will only fund up to eight studentships in total. Projects selected for funding will be determined based on applicant merit through the selection process outlined below.

Applicants shortlisted for this project will be invited to interview with a panel comprising members of the supervisory team and the School’s Postgraduate Research (PGR) Lead and/or a senior researcher from the School or College. Successful candidates will be offered a studentship following interview, and all applicants will be notified of the outcome within two weeks.

Candidates who meet the entry requirements for doctoral study at UWE Bristol but are not awarded one of the funded studentships may be offered the opportunity to take-up a self‑funded PhD place.

This studentship is based in the College of Arts, Technology and Environment.

This PhD will develop advanced machine‑vision and AI models to recognise emotional states in farm animals from whole‑body behaviour, addressing a key challenge in scalable welfare monitoring. Building on the Centre for Machine Vision’s extensive work in precision livestock technologies, the project will explore multimodal visual representations, behaviour tokenisation, and interpretable deep learning to identify emotionally salient cues in posture, movement dynamics, and spatiotemporal patterns in species such as pigs and cattle.

The research will focus on designing an emotion‑aware body‑language model capable of predicting affective state from video and will use existing curated datasets, annotation frameworks, and validated behavioural scoring approaches such as Qualitative Behavioural Assessment. Sub‑objectives include developing behavioural tokens for interpretability, assessing model robustness across individuals and contexts, and creating an evaluation framework that measures both classification performance and emotional trajectories over time.

The project is strongly supported by major interdisciplinary initiatives including the AWARE‑AI and HoliWell projects, ensuring immediate access to large‑scale datasets, established pipelines, and expert collaborators. Expected outputs include interpretable, scalable emotion‑recognition models, strong publication opportunities, and clear translational pathways into commercial precision‑livestock systems, contributing to UWE’s strategic aims and future REF impact.

If you have any questions about the studentship, please contact Professor Lyndon Smith at lyndon.smith@uwe.ac.uk.

Funding

The studentship is available from 1 October 2026 for a period of three years, subject to satisfactory progress and includes a tax-exempt stipend, which is currently £20,780 (2025/26) per annum.

In addition, full-time tuition fees will be covered for up to three years.

How to apply

Please submit your application online. When prompted use the reference number 2627-OCT-CATE13. 

Application deadline

The closing date for applications is 12^th June 2026.

Supporting documentation

You will need to upload your research proposal, all your degree certificates and transcripts and a recognised English language qualification is required.

You will need to provide details of two referees as part of your application.

Interview dates

It is expected that interviews will take place on weeks commencing June. If you have not heard from us by July, we thank you for your application but on this occasion you have not been successful.

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