You are invited to apply for a full-time Early Stage Researcher/PhD student position within the EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network, 'CLARIFY – CLoud ARtificial Intelligence For pathologY', Grant Agreement number 860627. CLARIFY is an innovative, multinational, multi-sectorial, and multidisciplinary research and training programme that links two highly differentiated specialities: engineering and medicine, with a focus on data management, decision making and application of artificial intelligence in digital pathology. 
For more information visit www.clarify-project.eu

The CLARIFY project comprises 12 positions in i) artificial intelligence, ii) cloud computing, and iii) clinical pathology. Within the project there are positions available at the following partners:

• ESR1 and ESR2 - Universiteit Van Amsterdam, Faculty of Science (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• SR3 - bitYoga AS (Stavanger, Norway)
• ESR4 and ESR5 - University of Stavanger, Dept of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Stavanger, Norway)
• ESR6 and ESR7 - Universitat Politècnica de València, Institute for Research and Innovation in Bioengineering (Valencia, Spain)
• ESR8 - Universidad de Granada, Research Center on Information and Communication Technologies (Granada, Spain)
• ESR9 - Tyris Software S.L. (Valencia, Spain)
• ESR10 - Erasmus Medisch Centrum Rotterdam, Department of Urology (Rotterdam, Netherlands)
• ESR11 - Helse Stavanger HF, Department of Pathology (Stavanger, Norway)
• ESR12 - Fundación para La Investigación del Hospital Clínico de la Comunitat Valenciana, Anatomic Pathology Department, University Clinic Hospital (Valencia, Spain). 

What are you going to do?

We are looking for a PhD candidate who wishes to develop expertise in big data management and cloud computing. The PhD project will focus on new approaches and techniques for building efficient data analysis and processing workflows across multiple heterogeneous infrastructures. In this position you will tackle the semantic interoperability challenges among different data infrastructures, and provide effective data services for enabling large scale distributed data-centric applications using semantic search, metadata alignment, knowledge graph, workflow management, and machine learning techniques. You will particularly focus on solutions for discovering, accessing, and processing data with specific application requirements for data quality, privacy, and system performance. During this position, you will have to travel to other partners in the project for several months.

You should have a master degree in computer science or other relevant disciplines from a recognized university and be fluent in speaking and writing English. Specifically, we are interested in people with:

• strong motivation to do research on the data management and semantic related problems (e.g. regarding metadata, semantic modelling, ontologies, knowledge graph and semantic search);
• strong motivation for doing interdisciplinary research;
• experiences on machine learning and medical applications are preferred;
• experience in programming (using Java, Python or other languages);
• excellent communication skills.

Eligibility criteria

Applicants, at the date of recruitment, must comply with the following conditions:

• be in the first four years* of his/her research career and not have a doctoral degree and
• not have resided in the country of the recruiting beneficiary for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately before the recruitment date (and not have carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in that country).

* is measured from the date when a researcher obtained the degree which would formally entitle him or her to embark on a doctorate, either in the country in which the degree was obtained or in the country in which the researcher is recruited. Master students who finish the master in 2019-2020 could apply for CLARIFY positions if they include a letter of commitment to ensure the master’s conclusion in 2019-2020 and their enrolment in a PhD program in 2020-2021. The breach of this commitment will be grounds for contract termination.​​​

Fixed-term contract: 1.5 years.

A temporary contract for 38 hours per week, preferably starting on 1 May 2020 for the duration of 18 months. After a satisfactory evaluation the contract will be extended for 30 months and should lead to a dissertation (PhD thesis). You will get a customized Training and Supervision Plan, that will be evaluated every year.    

The salary, depending on relevant experience before the beginning of the employment contract, will be €2,325 to €2,972 (scale P) gross per month, based on fulltime (38 hours a week), exclusive 8 % holiday allowance and 8.3 end-of-year bonus. A favorable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities is applicable.

For the travel to our partners you will get a travel budget. If you come to the Netherlands with your family and comply to the rules of the project for this, there is a budget available.

Are you curious about our extensive package of secondary employment benefits like our excellent opportunities for study and development? Then find out more about working at the Faculty of Science.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.

Faculty of Science – Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics

The Faculty of Science has a student body of around 6,500, as well as 1,600 members of staff working in education, research or support services. Researchers and students at the Faculty of Science are fascinated by every aspect of how the world works, be it elementary particles, the birth of the universe or the functioning of the brain.

The MNS group  is part of the Systems and Security Lab (SNE), one of the three research clusters at the Informatics Institute. The group focuses its researches on the fundamental architectural problems that arise from the interconnection of systems and of data flows. We look at the emerging architectures that can support the operations of the future Internet. In particular we focus on the delivery of secure and sustainable ICT services across multiple domains. Device programmability and virtualization play in this field an ever-increasing role in designing networks and ICT infrastructures. We address the interoperability challenges in supporting discovery, analysis and interoperation between heterogeneous complex infrastructures. Our vision is to build an effective ‘knowledge fibre’ to facilitate information discovery, integration and reuse across distributed infrastructures.