We are looking for up to three Postdoctoral Research Fellows to work on a new FP7-funded project 
STRANDS "Spatio-Temporal Representations and Activities for Cognitive Control in Long-Term 
Scenarios". STRANDS will develop new technologies to allow mobile robots to acquire and use 
semantic maps of indoor spaces that capture not just spatial information (walls, doors etc.), 
but also the spatio-temporal structure of the dynamics which change such spaces (e.g. human 
activities with objects). To do this, these robots must be able learn and operate reliably in 
long-term deployments (from weeks to months of autonomous activity). Our robots will be tested 
over long-term operation in real-world care and building security applications.

STRANDS is coordinated by the Intelligent Robotics Lab (IRLab, http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/go/irlab) 
in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, UK. As a member of the STRANDS 
team you will be working with five other leading EU research groups and two industrial partners. 
You will work as part of a team of six researchers on STRANDS at Birmingham, and around 30 
researchers in STRANDS as a whole. The work will be performed in the world-class research 
environment provided by the IRLab, alongside exceptional researchers on national and EU projects, 
including two further new EU projects starting in early 2013.

The challenging tasks to be undertaken at Birmingham in STRANDS include learning qualitative 
spatial representations of indoor environments; planning the sequence of observations a mobile 
robot should make to learn and recognise activities (i.e. active spatio-temporal mapping); and 
the integration of motivation, learning and temporal behaviour planning capabilities into a rich 
architecture for long-term robot perception and action.  Applicants are be expected to play a lead 
role creating original solutions to one or more of these problems, with exact responsibilities 
being decided on appointment depending on interest and experience. 

To apply, you should have completed a PhD in AI, Robotics or a related discipline. You should 
ideally have expertise in one of AI planning, decision theoretic planning, view planning, object 
search, qualitative spatial reasoning or probabilistic robotics more generally. You should have a 
high level of analytical ability and computational skills, including programming and knowledge of 
standard robotics software.

The posts are available from April 1st 2013 for up to 48 months. Appointments will be made at the 
appropriate salary grade based on qualifications and experience. Salaries range from £27,854 a 
year up to £44,607 a year, with potential progression to £50,186. 

Informal enquiries may be made to Project Coordinator Dr Nick Hawes (n.a.hawes@cs.bham.ac.uk) and 
Dr Jeremy Wyatt (j.l.wyatt@cs.bham.ac.uk) in the School of Computer Science. Please mark your email
“STRANDS Fellowship Enquiry”.

More more information, and links to the online application site, visit: 
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/groupings/robotics/2012/12/strands-rfs/

cheers,

-- 
Dr. Nick Hawes

Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham
www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~nah || +44 121 414 3739 || skype: nickhawes