The Career Work | Scholarships and Grants

A 3-year PhD scholarship in Video processing within embodied multi-sensor cognitive artificial systems will be available Department of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering (DIBE), University of Genova, Italy starting from January 2012.

The project
The proposed PhD involves the study of problems mainly related to understanding of complex scenes from multisensor networks: focus will be on data association and state estimation methods for joint shape/color/position object tracking from multicamera data.
Activities will be oriented to address the use of developed methods within bio-inspired cognitive artificial systems for physical security and telecommunications.
Possibility will be open during the PhD to join on going funded research projects when available within the joint labs ISIP40 has with industries (e.g Technoaware, Telecom, ligurian industrial district SIIT).

Qualifications
The successful candidate must hold a Master degree or equivalent qualifications (Laurea Vecchio Ordinamento or Laurea Specialistica degree for Italian applicants) in one of the following fields :

• Telecommunication Engineering

• Electronic Engineering

• Information Engineering

• Computer Science (or Laurea degree in Informatica)

The candidate must have basic knowledge in the following topics:

• Signal Processing

• Pattern Recognition

• C/C++ programming

Fluency in spoken and written English is also a requirement.

The selection process
The interested applicants please contact Prof. Carlo Regazzoni not later than September 12, 2011.
The application is divided into two phases.
In the first phase the interested applicants should send their complete CV and two recommendation letters to Prof. Carlo Regazzoni, e-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

An evaluation committee will be appointed to evaluate the applications. Applicants will be notified of the composition of the committee and will receive the part of the evaluation that concerns her/him. The final selection of a successful candidate will be made by Prof. Carlo Regazzoni, based on the recommendations of the evaluation committee. The successful candidate will then be requested to formally apply for enrollment as a PhD student at the University of Genova. On line application http://servizionline.unige.it/studenti/post-laurea/dottorato) available from August 2, 2011 at 9.00 (Italian time) to September 23, 2011 at 12.00 noon (Italian time).

An intermediate grant will be provided for candidates who are successful at the end of the first phase. Success in the first phase does not give any right for the following phase and the final admission.

Candidates will have to take admission written and oral examination with a inter/university commission in dates to be communicated (around October/November 2011) to obtain the PhD position

Terms of employment
The successful PhD candidate will be offered a full-time PhD position for a period of three years, contingent on a satisfactory performance, with the specific intent that it results in a PhD degree and scientific publications.
The research grant consists of about 14,000 Euro/year.

For further information, please contact Prof. Carlo Regazzoni at email: carlo[ at ]dibe.unige.it, or Dr. Lucio Marcenaro at email mlucio[ at ]dibe.unige.it. General information on the Department of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering of the University of Genova and Isip40 group can be found at http://dibe.unige.it and http://www.isip40.it respectively.

How to apply:
Applicants are requested to submit their application by sending a complete CV and two recommendation letters to Prof. Carlo Regazzoni (carlo[ at ]dibe.unige.it) and Dr. Lucio Marcenaro ( mlucio[ at ]dibe.unige.it). Please include in the email subject field “your name - PhD-CS”.

Applications must include (i) motivation for the application, (ii) a project description including technical approaches (max 3 pages), (iii) curriculum vitae including list of publications, (iv) a copy (and a transcript) of M.Sc. diploma or equivalent, (v) a short abstract of the M.Sc. thesis or equivalent, and (vi) the names, e-mails, telephone numbers and addresses of 2 referees.

The deadline for first phase applications is Monday 12 September 2011.

Applications received after the deadline, or with insufficient documentation or otherwise not complying with the above requirements, will not be considered.

The vIdeo and SIgnal Processing For Telecommunications (ISIP40) research team was founded in 1991 by Prof. Carlo Regazzoni starting from the expertise acquired in the Signal Processing and Telecommunications Group of Prof. Gianni Vernazza.
Leader of the group is still Prof. Regazzoni, Full Professor at the University of Genova, and he can rely on the help of 1 Assistant Professor, 3 PhD students, 2 research grant co-operators and a number of external collaborators. Teaching activities allow to involve B.Sc. and M.Sc. students in the research activities of the team.
Thanks to co-operations with industries and other university groups, two new joint laboratories has been created: Ambient Awareness Laboratory (A2Lab) and Cognitive Radio Laboratory, whose reaserch activities are focused on Cognitive Surveillance and Video Surveillance and on Cognitive Radio and Wideband Communications.
The research group has a number of active projects with national and international industries and academic partners.
Ambient Intelligence area is oriented to provide increased personalized services to the user.
This tasks is obtained by developing systems composed by heterogeneous sensors able to extract high-level features.
Subsequently analysis, decision and personalized communications are the main steps in order to satisfy the users query depending to the context.

Cognitive Surveillance research area is involved in developing automatic systems able to recognize events of interests.
Mainly, the research is oriented to realize automatic systems able to detect and track objects and to recognize particular situations as panic events in area of interest. Using this information, bio-inspired techniques are designed to provide the system with the capability of learning from the experience the interactions with the external world. Then, adaptive decision strategies exploit this skill to act (through actuators) directly on the environment and change its current state for security, in case preventive, tasks.

For more information, please refer to the university’s announcement (http://www.isip40.it/).

Further Information

Application Deadline : 23 September 2011

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