Job description

This project will focus on the understanding, monitoring, and prediction of the quality of volumetric media signals, primarily point clouds, which undergo various kinds of processing, such as lossy compression and streaming.

We are looking for one postdoctoral researcher who will join a team that is currently building a real-time capture, encoding and transmission platform for immersive communications, in the framework of the European project VRTogether (https://vrtogether.eu). She/he will be responsible for the development of signal quality monitoring tools to be integrated in the platform and for the design and deployment of user studies to assess the perceived quality of the signals by human viewers.

The work carried out in the group will result in scientific publications in top-level venues in Multimedia and HCI conferences and journals (e.g., ACM Multimedia Systems, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, etc). Moreover, the candidate will have the opportunity of participating and influencing standardization initiatives (e.g., MPEG).

The appointment is for one year, with possibility of extension.

Requirements
Candidates are required to have a PhD degree in computer science or related field, and expected to have an excellent command of English, with good academic writing and presentation skills. We invite applications from individuals who are familiar with computer vision techniques, multimedia systems, video compression and streaming technologies in particular. Knowledge on volumetric signals, particularly point clouds, is a plus. This position will also involve designing and running controlled studies, and drawing on both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods. Previous experience with psychovisual testing and subjective experiments is a plus.

We expect candidates to have excellent programming skills (C/C++, Python). Experience with Unity is a plus.

Fixed-term contract: 1 year.

Terms and conditions 
The terms of employment are in accordance with the Dutch Collective Labour Agreement for Research Centres ("CAO-onderzoeksinstellingen"). The gross monthly salary for an employee on a full time basis, depending on relevant work experience, ranges from € 3,560 to € 4,339. The appointment will be for a period of one year.

Employees are also entitled to a holiday allowance of 8% of the gross annual salary and a year-end bonus of 8.33%. CWI offers attractive working conditions, including flexible scheduling.

Please visit our website for more information about our terms of employment: https://www.cwi.nl/jobs/terms-of-employment

About Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science and is part of the Institutes Organisation of NWO. The mission of CWI is to conduct pioneering research in mathematics and computer science, generating new knowledge in these fields and conveying it to trade, industry, and society at large.

CWI is an internationally oriented institute, with 160 scientists from approximately 27 countries. The facilities are first-rate and include excellent IT support, career planning, training, and courses.

CWI is located at Science Park Amsterdam that is presently developing into a major location of research in the natural sciences in The Netherlands, housing the sciences of the University of Amsterdam and of the Vrije Universiteit as well as several other national research institutes next to CWI.

Research group
The Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group from CWI: Future multimedia systems will be intelligent and empathic, capable of understanding the user and the environment. Extending techniques from distributed networking and contextual modeling, the DIS group adapts and extends traditional research on multimedia systems from this new perspective. Our research questions not only address how fast bits are delivered, but also how well they are utilized. We combine data science with a strong human-centric, empirical approach. This results in a full-stack methodology that enables us to bridge socio-technical gaps in society and science, by instrumenting the appropriate infrastructures and communication protocols using realistic testing grounds. The group enjoys a number of fruitful partnerships with companies and organizations in the areas of creative industries and smart cities. More information: http://www.dis.cwi.nl