Job offer for a Postdoctoral Position at CiTIUS

The Research Centre in Information Technologies of the University of Santiago de Compostela (CiTIUS) is seeking a postdoctoral researcher for a period of two years.

CiTIUS is part of the Campus Vida of the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), which has been acknowledged as one from the eight International Campuses of Excellence by the Spanish Ministries of Education, Science and Innovation and it aspires to become 1 of the top 100 best biocampuses worldwide. CiTIUS, created as one of the fundamental pieces of the research strategy of Campus Vida, undertakes almost all the research activities of USC in the area of Information Technologies. According to CWTS Leiden Ranking 2013, USC was ranked as the world’s third placed and the Europe’s first place in the field of Mathematics and Computer Science, regarding MNCS (mean normalized citation score) impact indicator.

Researcher profile

CiTIUS research lines are structured in seven Scientific Programs. The successful candidate will work in one of the following research projects:

  1. Big Data: efficient data storage, declarative querying and efficient data mining techniques that perform efficiently over Big Data collections of heterogeneous sensor data.
  2. Ambient Intelligence: development of algorithms for multisensorial data processing and scenes interpretation particularly gestural interaction, 3D tracking, objects recognition and context interaction.
  3. High Performance Computing: performance optimization of parallel applications on heterogeneous systems.
  4. Innovating in sensorized personal smart devices and weareables: development of smart systems with cognitive abilities, decisional autonomy, interaction capabilities and/or motion capabilities.
  5. Artificial Vision: design of low-power smart CMOS cameras with energy harvesting capabilities, 2D and 3D image acquisition and processing, design of distributed lightweight algorithms.
  6. Business Intelligence: data collection from sensorized devices, filtering and processing algorithms and development of added-value services.
  7. E-Health: development of tools for integration of multimodal information from multiple devices in order to perform an accurate diagnosis.

Offer research objectives and specific required skills are detailed below for each research project.

Position details

The postdoctoral position is for a period of two years. The contract period may be extended if the successful candidate complies the Marie Curie mobility rule: not have resided or carried out their main activity in the host country (Spain) for more than 12 months in the last 3 years. Applicants will receive a gross salary of about 2.630€ per month (31.600€ per year). The estimated date of commencement is: June or July 2014. The selection criteria will be scientific excellence of the candidate in one of the above mentioned research projects.

Nr of positions available: 1

Applications

Candidates must indicate in their application the profile they are applying for. The application must contain information of research background and work experience, including:

  1. A motivation letter outlining background, experience and interest in one of the above mentioned topics.
  2. A detailed CV, including personal contact information and list of publications.

Applications must be submitted by e-mail to citius.idi@usc.es with the subject: POSTDOCTORAL POSITION: [Research project name]

Closing date for applications: 16.05.14 at 23h59 CEST (UCT +02:00)

1. Big Data

A. Description and research objectives

Huge amounts of data are being collected every day from a number of different devices (ranging from sensor networks or personal mobile devices to satellite sensors) and in many application domains (environment, astronomy, medical diagnostic, …). Internet of Things has provided intelligence and communication power to the most common devices we have in our homes, and our proactiveness in Crowd-Sensing applications has put these data in a free way access in a Big Data repositories. The Big Data paradigm arises in this context from specific application fields (scientific, technological or business oriented) that set scientific and technological challenges regarding efficient mechanisms and tools for data storing, representation, management, data processing and analysis and also human interaction for converting data into useful and relevant information.

Based on the above, two broad research objectives are now proposed for the offered position:
•    Efficient Data Storage and Declarative Querying of Big Data Collections of Heterogeneous Sensor Data. Development of original solutions for the storage and efficient declarative querying of sensor data adapted to flexible and scalable hardware architectures. Scalability, availability, robustness, data integrity and usability issues should be taken into account during the development of the solutions.
•    Efficient Data Mining techniques that perform efficiently over Big Data Collections of Heterogeneous Sensor Data. Development of original solutions for data mining and/or statistical analysis of big data collections. General purpose solutions should be produced that take into account the inherent temporal evolution of the sensor data and might also provide support to incorporate in the analysis the spatial location of the data. Special attention should be paid to the scalability, usability and interpretability of the solutions.

B. Qualifications and skills

Applicants must have a PhD in computer science or related fields.
The candidates need to have a strong background in the following areas: Big Data processing and analytics, federated data infrastructure, data mining, statistics. Experience in Hadoop, MapReduce, Cassandra, Weka, R, or similar tools is required. Experience with a real application development related with Big Data will be considered an asset.
Excellent skills in distributed and parallel databases, and data mining techniques are expected, as well as fluent English.

2. Ambient Intelligence

A. Description and research objectives

Postdoctoral position on multisensorial data interpretation. Ambient intelligence Scientific Program aims to design and develop solutions that make the environment in which people develop their everyday life activity to recognize the characteristics and needs of its users, adapt to them dynamically and react to provide the services needed at all times, making a more efficient and sustainable use of the available resources. In this context, the development of algorithms that allow, through the data fusion of multimodal information from sensor networks, an interpretation of scenes is of crucial importance. Recognition techniques, gestural interaction, tracking and 3D location are among the topics of interest. Also energy efficiency considerations should be taken into account through the optimization of lightweight algorithms on low-power consumption platforms ideally combined with the harvesting of energy from the environment.

B. Qualifications and skills

Applicants must have a PhD in the field of electronic engineering, physics, computer science or any other related field.
The candidates need to have a strong background in scene interpretation, particularly in the following fields: 3D tracking; gestural interaction; visual object detection, recognition and classification; context interaction; human activity recognition.
The applicants must have good communication skills, be able to work in a team environment and have fluent English skills.

3. High Performance Computing

A. Description and research objectives

The HPC and Cloud Computing Scientific Program is conducting research on design principles for the next generations of parallel computer systems. An important research objective of this Scientific Program is to achieve high and predictable computational performance on different platforms.
In this frame, the research line of this job offer is Performance optimization of parallel applications on heterogeneous systems. In this project, performance optimization is intended to deal three different criteria: execution time, energy efficiency and resource usage. As a consequence, the main objective of the project is to find solutions to this multiobjective optimization problem.
Several target heterogeneous systems will be considered in the project, so any combination of FPGA, embedded systems, GPUs, multicores, manycores, clusters, MPPs and cloud infrastructures, are candidates according to the expertise of the candidate.
Regarding parallel applications, the focus will be on computational intensive applications, in particular image processing, simulations, bioinformatics, and irregular codes. A set of benchmarks and case studies in these fields will be selected to this project.

B. Qualifications and skills

Applicants must have a PhD in computer science, mathematics or physics.
The candidates need to have a strong background in most of the following fields: computer science, computer engineering, parallel and distributed computing, programming parallel applications. The candidates should also have experience in the use of different kind of computer infrastructures.
Excellent skills in team work and fluent English are essential.

4. Innovating in sensorized smart devices and wearables

A. Description and research objectives

The future is likely to see an enormous growth of sensorized personal smart systems and wearables. Personal computing is shifting towards handheld devices characterized by many features of interest: (a) high-end reliable sensors previously unavailable to lay users-cameras, microphones, GPS receivers, accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, light, and touch sensors; (b) increasing processing power; (c) a growing number of advanced software libraries, including signal processing modules; (d) continuous internet connectivity through wireless and mobile data networks; and (e) high mobility, due to small weight, small size, and battery power. Nevertheless, the ability of new intelligent systems to process information is not enough. Personal smart devices and wearables will need to be endowed with a new level of cognitive skills and intelligence, to expand the number of tasks that can solve, and to allow the improvement of their possibilities and ability to operate in open-ended environments, with natural interaction with humans and other artificial cognitive systems.
From this point of view, these personal smart systems can benefit from recent advances in personal robots. Just to mention an example, all research that has been done in robot localization has the potential to play a vital role in the indoor localization capabilities of the next generation of these smart personal devices.
The research programme “Personal Robots” at CiTIUS brings together an important number of researchers with an important trajectory in robotics and computer vision. We are interested in a postdoctoral researcher with important skills and knowledge in sensorized personal smart systems. The aim is that the joint work of the candidate in conjunction with other researchers in the field of robotics, machine learning and computer vision, allows facing new and open challenges to achieve smart systems with new levels of cognitive skills and intelligence: ability to learn, adapt, deliberate, weigh alternatives, take decisions on incomplete data, face complex tasks such as inertial navigation, etc.

B. Qualifications and skills

Experience in one or more of the following items will be an advantage:
•    Research on sensor data treatment with accelerometers, gyroscopes, or magnetometers.
•    Background in inertial navigation, or indoor positioning.
•    Programming for android or iOS devices (e.g. smartphones, smartwatches, wrists, etc.).

Applicants must have a doctoral degree and must be fluent in English. The candidate will collaborate with people that are already developing research in robotics and computer vision. Therefore we look for a person able to provide a bridge amongst sensorized personal smart devices and recent advances in robotics, machine learning and computer vision. Hence, although it would be very interesting that the candidate has some kind of knowledge in machine learning or computer vision (a PhD in Computer Science or Computer Vision would be interesting), it is more valuable the knowledge in these sensorized personal smart devices and their open challenges.

5. Artificial Vision

A. Description and research objectives

The Artificial Vision Scientific Program is interested in a postdoctoral researcher with broad knowledge in artificial vision techniques and proposes three research objectives for the position:
•    Design of low-power smart CMOS cameras with energy-harvesting capabilities.
•    2D and 3D image acquisition and processing either stereo or ToF
•    Design of distributed lightweight vision algorithms on low-cost battery-operated hardware platforms

B. Qualifications and skills

Applicants must have a doctoral degree in the field of Electronic Engineering, Physics or Computer Science.
The candidates need to have a strong background in the following fields:
•    Mixed-signal design: strong background in cadence design tools and knowledge of ASIC design methodology
•    Computer vision with emphasis on distributed algorithms
•    Digital design (ARM, FPGA, DSP, …): able to make system level judgment and associated trade-offs. Experience in RTL design and verification of ICs is a plus
The applicants must have good communication skills, be able to work in a team environment and have fluent English skills.

6. Business Intelligence

A. Description and research objectives

PostDoctoral researcher on Intelligent services deployed on sensorised devices. The candidate will work on sensor data collection (from mobile devices, e.g. smartphones or tablets), filtering and processing algorithms, and the development of added-value services in the areas of Web Intelligence and Business Intelligence. The candidate will collaborate with the members of the Scientific Program of “Web Intelligence and Business Intelligence” in order to develop innovative solutions in one or several of the following areas: data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, natural language processing, semantic web, recommender systems, business processes & services, and knowledge extraction & representation of spatial/temporal data.

B. Qualifications and skills

Applicants must have a doctoral degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related fields and must have strong background on smart sensorised devices. Programming experience with smart devices is essential, while experience in distributed large-scale data processing algorithms is desirable. Any experience on any of the above indicated areas data will be an asset.
Applicants are expected to have leadership qualities, the ability to collaborate with interdisciplinary teams, and strong interpersonal as well as good English language skills.

7. E-health

A. Description and research objectives

The main objective of the project will be the development of new diagnostic methodologies based on the translation of multidisciplinary scientific and technological knowledge from several fields into clinical applications. Focus will be on the development of tools for integration of multimodal information from multiple devices as it happens with brain, where signals from different sources (one-dimensional signals, images from different modalities,...) have to be integrated in order to perform an accurate diagnosis.
A major part of the work will consist in the development of new algorithms for improving diagnosis, prediction or assessment of therapeutic response, with a significant impact on clinical decisions. The development of tools for computer aided-diagnosis, tracking of patient’s evolution, and design and evaluation of new integrated diagnostic variables will be some of the major outlines of the project.

B. Qualifications and skills

The applicants must have received their doctoral degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related fields. The candidate should have a strong computational background with special emphasis in medical imaging, signal processing and machine learning.
He/She must be able to work effectively in a multidisciplinary team environment and to partner with different professionals from the university and hospitals. The candidate must have exceptional communication skills, capable of interacting with peers and students and technical staff. Wide experience in the development of methodologies for the integration of multimodal signals would be desirable.
Fluent English is essential.