[visionlist] 3 years Post-doc Position at LOA-ISTC-CNR Trento (Italy)

[roberta.ferrario at cnr.it]

Applications are invited for 1 three-years Postdoctoral Research  
Fellowship position at CNR in Trento  
(http://www.istc.cnr.it/opportunities/vacancies/Graduate-Fellowships/open) in  
collaboration with the VIPS laboratory of the Università degli Studi  
di Verona

Application deadline: July 30, 2012

Title of the research: The position is related to a research project  
funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento: ‘VISCOSO - Detection of  
Crisis in Socio-Material Systems via Visual-Cognitive-Social Processes’.

Goal of the research: One of the main challenges addressed by the  
project is the development of an innovative visual recognition system  
for group activities, embedding a strong “ontological support”.   
Standard visual recognition systems consist in a set of robust  
classifiers aimed at capturing simple gestures and actions, which are  
spatio-temporally composed into group activities afterwards, following  
predefined heuristic rules (ex: the fact that two people are seated  
very close looking at each other implies they are interacting). The  
project will overcome this limit, injecting in the recognition process  
an ontological support, i.e., an ontological model, which can be  
intended as structured a-priori knowledge and will be built leveraging  
on cognitive and sociological studies. The cooperation of the ontology  
and the visual classifiers will be deployed in two directions,  
inference and learning. In the former, rich ontological descriptions  
of the physical environment, the possible social bonds among people,  
and the tasks that could be achieved in a given scenario will enhance  
the performances of the classifiers in finding the most plausible  
description of what is going on.  In the latter, persistent  
observations may revise the ontology, producing a better explanation  
of the expected scenario.   The project will impact in the domains of  
Ontology Learning, Science and Technologies Studies, Machine Learning,  
Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition and Social Signal Processing,  
with important relapses in Surveillance and Domotics.

More detailed information on the project may be found here:
http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/ferrario/VISCOSO/index.html


Profile:  Applicants must have completed a Ph.D. in the  
above-mentioned fields and must have demonstrated the ability to  
pursue a cutting-edge program of research.

Lab environment: The successful candidate will be based at the  
Laboratory for Applied Ontology (ISTC-LOA),  
(http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/). LOA was founded in January 2003. Its  
main activities concern the ontological foundations of knowledge  
engineering and conceptual data modeling, and more generally the role  
of semantic technologies in the representation of knowledge, access of  
information, integration of heterogeneous information, development of  
databases, natural language processing, multi-agent systems, software  
engineering, and information systems in the broad sense.  The project  
will see the collaboration with the VIPS lab at the Università degli  
Studi di Verona, and in particular with Dr. Marco Cristani, whose  
interests are Computer Vision, and especially Social Signal Processing  
with statistical generative models. The VIPS lab, headed by Vittorio  
Murino, has been founded in 1999; and covers a broad spectrum of  
issues mostly related to Video Analysis and Medical Image Analysis.   
With around 350 papers and 4000 citations, is one of the main Italian  
group of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.


How to Apply: The notice of selection (bando) is available at the  
following addresses:
http://www.istc.cnr.it/opportunities/vacancies/Graduate-Fellowships/open

or, alternatively:
http://bandi.urp.cnr.it/assegni/faces/pubblica/RisultatoCercaAssegniPubblica.jsp
(click at the top, on the right “Advanced Search”, then at the bottom,  
on the right select “TN” from the menu “Provincia”)

For any other enquires, please contact the head of the project, dr.  
Roberta Ferrario (roberta.ferrario at cnr.it)




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