PhD or Postdoc position in Computational Social Science / More Innovative Cities and Co-Creation

In der aktuellen Covid-19 Situation laufen die Rekrutierungen weiter. Es kann dabei allerdings zu Verzögerungen kommen. Vielen Dank für Ihr Verständnis.

100%, Zurich, fixed-term

Research at the Professorship of Computational Social Science (COSS) is focused on:

• bringing modeling and computer simulation of social processes and transportation phenomena together with technology, experimental, and data-driven work,
• combining the perspectives of different scientific disciplines (e.g., social science, computer science, complexity science and sociophysics),
• bridging fundamental and applied work,
• developing digital tools to support people and studying the resulting behavior.

Project background

Information about the COSS team can be found on our website . For information about the ERC Project on Co-Evolving City Life .

Job description

You would create novel research breakthroughs and contribute to an ambitious, international research project in subject areas connected to smart cities and digital societies. The research focus would be on more innovative cities and co-creation, with the main underlying research question: How can more participatory cities be organized such that they do not get chaotic, inefficient, and dysfunctional, but more innovative, coordinated and efficient over time? Based on a self-developed or co-created demonstrator, it should be shown that digitally assisted self-organization supporting particular kinds of interactions can serve to significantly increase creativity, co-creation, coordination, efficiency and functionality.

Together with our team, the you should work out a new paradigm of how to operate cities in an innovative and cooperative way, when citizens are given opportunities for co-creation. The challenge to be addressed is how the innovative and problem-solving potential of civil society may be unleashed by means of new, participatory formats such as City Olympics or Open Source Urbanism, which support co-creation and combinatorial innovation. You should also try to formalize the mathematical characteristics of such coupled innovation processes by statistical analyses of laboratory, online and real-life experiments.

Please visit our webpages for more information about our projects.

Your profile

You  should have an excellent research background in:

• computational social science
• complexity science
• computer science
• data science
• socio-physics
• and/or transportation science in one of the areas mentioned above

Excellent scientific and computational skills, English language skills, social skills, and international experience are required. We expect you to appreciate collaborating in a diverse, interdisciplinary, and multicultural team to jointly and systematically address grand scientific challenges.

Please indicate, whether you are also skilled and willing to develop a software platform of reasonable complexity or a smartphone app, or able to develop parallel code for parallel processing on supercomputers, and what software environments you are using for this.

ETH Zurich

ETH Zurich is one of the world’s leading universities specialising in science and technology. We are renowned for our excellent education, cutting-edge fundamental research and direct transfer of new knowledge into society. Over 30,000 people from more than 120 countries find our university to be a place that promotes independent thinking and an environment that inspires excellence. Located in the heart of Europe, yet forging connections all over the world, we work together to develop solutions for the global challenges of today and tomorrow.

Working, teaching and research at ETH Zurich