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One PostDoc Position – REF: SAGA-POST

Fondazione Graphitech, Trento - Italy (www.graphitech.it) is looking for two young and motivated candidates willing to work on a forthcoming European project. At the moment two positions are to be filled: one for a PhD and one for a postdoc. The candidates will work within a motivated and highly competent international context, in close contact with leading EU Universities, Research Centres and Industries. Frequent travel within Europe is expected. Both positions foresee a very competitive salary depending on the experience of the candidate.

Candidates must not be Italian and must not have resided or carried out their main activity in Italy for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to their recruitment. Candidates’ research experience may not exceed 5 years at the time of the appointment. They must speak fluent English, should be capable to confront new scientific challenges and should have a problem-solving attitude.

The two candidates will have to address the following research goals.

Research Goal

Creating shapes in a three dimensional environment is a complex operation which often requires the adoption of very constrained techniques. The shape modelling phase plays a fundamental role within the design process because it allows the improvement of the visual appeal of artefacts. It also enhances ergonomics and the product’s commercial competitiveness through product differentiation. Natural and intuitive, yet mathematically correct, creation and modification of surfaces is a fundamental requirement when flexibility and intuition have to be privileged to unleash the designer’s creativity during the concept design phase. Efficient and intuitive shape manipulation techniques are therefore vital to the success of geometric modelling, computer animation, physical simulation and other computing areas.

The goal of the research is to define and support different forms of constraint-based design. In this context “constraints” are design features, preliminary defined by an operator, which should be properly integrated with the final CAD product. The activities include:

• Study of the type of representation of constraints within a CAD model.
• Analysis of CAD models’ geometry and topology.
• Identification of the points at which a constraint can fit the designed object as well as how the object should be evolved to satisfy the constraints.

This will be done within a software framework for interactive Virtual Reality-based applications. The framework allows the definition of design applications capable of providing multimodal user interfaces combining sketches, gestures and speech among others.

One PostDoc Position – REF: SAGA-POST

The position will lead to a postdoc project for a duration of at least 9 months. The candidate must either:

• be in possession of a doctoral degree, independently of the time taken to acquire it,
  
  or
  
  
• have at least four years of full-time equivalent research experience, including the 9 months period envisaged by the contract, after obtaining the degree which formally allowed them to embark on a doctorate.

In either cases his/her research experience may not exceed 5 years at the time of the appointment.

Required profile

The candidate holds a master degree in Computer Science or Mathematics or Engineering with a PhD degree in one of the following topics: Computational Geometry, Approximation Theory, Numerical Analysis, 3D Computer Graphics. The candidate has significant experience in at least one of the following topics:

• Mathematical issues associated with CAD/CAM.
• Use of use CAD/CAM within the industrial process including problems caused by tolerances and inaccuracies.
• Problems related to conversion between representations of curves and surfaces.
• Mathematical issues behind surface and solid modelling.
• Topological operations between shapes.
• GPU (Graphics Processing Units) architectures and programming.
• Calculation parallelization using multi-core CPUs and/or multiple GPUs.

Requirements (additionally to those required for the PhD position):

• Five scientific publications in top peer-reviewed conferences and journals in the domain of reference.
• Previous experience/involvement in a EU project is considered a plus.