PhD position: EU H2020 project ‘HumMingBird’ 1633 views

The Social and Affective Computing group at the Utrecht University’s Department of Information and Computing Sciences is looking for a PhD candidate to conduct research on using mobile CDR data to study migration dynamics into Europe.

About the project:

• The project’s overall aim is to improve understandings of changing nature of migration flows and the drivers of migration, to analyse patterns and motivations and new geographies and to calculate population estimates and determine emerging trends and future trends and accordingly identify possible future implications of today’s policy decisions.
• The aim is to develop migration scenarios in a more forward-looking manner that takes into account both quantitative and qualitative perspectives of different migration actors.
• The candidate will specifically work with mobile CDR data, and collaborate with Turkcell, a major telecommunications operator in Turkey, which is providing data for the project.
• The HumMingBird project runs from 12/2019 – 12/2023, so ideally the candidate starts as soon as possible.

Study areas:

• Computational Social Science
• Mobile CDR Data
• Urban Computing
• Computational Demographics
• Statistics
• Migration Theories
• Spatio-Temporal Data Analysis

Qualifications:

• Applicant must hold Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computational Social Science, Computational Demographics, Data Science, and/or fields related to the project focus;
• Interest or experience with migration and refugee studies;
• Affinity with programming platforms for statistical computations, such as R, MATLAB, or Python;
• Experience with gathering and analysing large datasets;
• Willingness to work on an interdisciplinary project that combines many qualitative and quantitative information sources;
• Applicant must possess very good English oral and writing skills.
• Candidate should be able to demonstrate English language proficiency. We require a qualification English at C1 level (comparable to level 3 of the Lecturer Assessment Grid) or should be willing to obtain this level by training.

Applications:

Apply online and include the following with application:

• A letter of application which describes the motivation for the position
• CV (including contact details of two referees)