Ph.D Student in Mathematical Representations for Robotic Manipulation KTH School of Computer Science and Communication

 (CSC) announces a PhD position in Mathematical Representations for Robotic Manipulation

The Workplace

KTH in Stockholm is the largest and oldest technical university in Sweden. No less than one-third of Sweden’s technical research and engineering education capacity at university level is provided by KTH. Education and research spans from natural sciences to all branches of engineering and includes architecture, industrial management and urban planning. There are a total of just over 14,000 first and second level students and more than 1,700 doctoral students. KTH has almost 4,600 employees

KTH Computer Science and Communication is one of the most outstanding research and teaching environments in Information Technology in Sweden with activities at KTH and partly at Stockholm University. We conduct education and research in theoretical computer science, from theory building and analysis of mathematical models to algorithm construction, implementation and simulation.The applied computer science research and education dealing with computer vision, robotics, machine learning, computational biology, neuroinformatics and neural networks, including high performance computing, visualization and speech and music communication. It also conducts applied research and training in media technology, human-computer interaction, interaction design and sustainable development.
For more information about CSC, go to www.kth.se/csc

Assignment

KTH School of Computer Science and Communication (CSC) announces a PhD position in Robotics at the Centre for Autonomous Systems (www.cas.kth.se) and Computational Vision and Active Perception Lab ( www.csc.kth.se/cvap)

We are looking for a student who will investigate novel methods in robotic grasping and manipulation. Current approaches to robotic manipulation are largely representing such actions in a discrete and heuristic way. While currently even rigid object manipulation remains challenging due to the presence of incomplete and noisy data, we are particularly interested in developing novel continuous representations which are invariant under certain classes of deformations, thus enabling a robot to reason about deformable objects and/or classes of objects.

We are a leading lab pursuing this nascent area which is highly interdisciplinary and which can benefit from ideas from probability theory, Riemannian geometry and algebraic topology. The candidate will join the group of Prof. Danica Kragic ( www.csc.kth.se/~danik/) and will be co-supervised by Dr. Florian Pokorny ( www.csc.kth.se/~fpokorny/).

This is a four-year time-limited position that can be extended up to a year with the inclusion of a maximum of 20% departmental duties, usually teaching.  Doctoral students must be registered at KTH. The starting date is open for discussion, though ideally we would like the successful candidate to start as soon as possible.

Employment

Form of employment: Time-limited
Work time: Full time
The salary follows the directions provided by KTH
Start date: According to agreement
Number of positions: 1

Qualifications

A suitable background for this position would be a Master of Science in Mathematics, Physics or the equivalent. In addition to the traditional academic merits a degree project within mathematics or physics, excellent programming skills, international experience and language skills are regarded as advantageous qualifications.

Applicants must be strongly motivated for doctoral studies, possess the ability to work independently and perform critical analysis as well as possess good levels of cooperative and communicative abilities.

Application

Application deadline: September 1st, 2013 
Employer's reference: D-2013-0460

Applications should be e-mailed to:
Camilla Johansson, E-mail: applications1@csc.kth.se. If you have any questions, contact us at: jobs@csc.kth.se. Write the reference number in the email subject. (CV, etc. should be sent as an attachment, as PDF-files.)

Application shall include the following documents:
1. Curriculum vitae
2. Transcripts from university/university college
3. Brief description of why the applicant wishes to become a doctoral student.

Please observe that all material needs to be in English, apart from the official document.
We are currently gathering information to help improve our recruitment process. We would, therefore, be very grateful if you could include an answer to the following question within your application: Where did you initially come across this job advertisement?

Contact(s)

For enquiries about Ph.D studies and employment conditions please contact:

Maria Widlund, HR Manager
Phone: +46 8 790 97 54
E-mail: mwidlund@kth.se

For enquiries about the project please contact:

Danica Kragic, Professor
Phone: +46 8 790 67 29
E-mail: dani@kth.se

Florian Pokorny, Dr
Phone: +46 8 790 61 38
E-mail: fpokorny@kth.se

Union representative

Lars Abrahamsson, SACO
Phone: +46 8 790 70 58
Email: lars.abrahamsson@ee.kth.se