Researcher Gamification of Urban Digital Twins

The project CU: European Cityverses Uniting for Inclusiveness (www.itc.nl/global-impact/itc-major-projects/!/cu) is a research and development initiative co-funded by the European Commission and the Royal Dutch Enterprise Agency (RVO). The University of Twente is a consortium partner in this project and is tasked with the gamification of the digital twin of the city of Gothenburg in Sweden (as a pilot project) to enhance the inclusivity of activities and the total experience of the city for people with diverse abilities and families of children with disabilities. The project has a total duration of 30 months, starting from October 2024 and ending on the 1st of April 2027.

Accordingly, we are looking for fresh graduates of geo-informatics, computer science (computer graphics), architecture (computational or procedural design), or related fields with demonstrable expertise in 3D modelling, gamification, and geospatial informatics. The topical subject areas of Procedural Content Generation (PCG), Role Playing Games (RPGs), Algorithmic Graph Drawing, Transport Modelling, Guided Way-Finding, and Optimal Path-Finding, Machine Learning, AI Assistants, Collaborative Filtering (Recommender Systems), and/or Polygon Mesh Processing are envisaged to be addressed in these temporary research assignments.

Your activities include assistance in writing reports and articles next to working on the digital implementation of gamified digital twin prototypes or digital proofs of concept; procedural cartography, defining location-based services, designing user interfaces, extended reality experiences, or a creative combination of these activities in consultation with the project partners. Experience in working with (vector-based) diagramming tools like FIGMA and DrawIO is quite helpful for this project. You will also be guided and encouraged to write open-source code in Python (NumPy-SciPy dialect) and work with MarkDown, LaTeX, and GitHub to produce the results. You can set up and run effective Git-based digital and online workflows for collaborative work.

Postdoctoral Position in Innovative Approaches to Governance and Knowledge Infrastructures for Biodiverse and Climate Just F...

Despite decades of biodiversity governance and conservation, the loss of nature and biodiversity continue unabated, while the impacts of climate change are becoming ever more acute. Halting this trend requires transformative changes that challenge the status quo and address the root causes of intersecting social and environmental challenges (IPBES 2019).

Bottom-up initiatives are important catalysts of such transformations and provide opportunities for communities to experiment with local solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss, such as urban agriculture and biodiversity. These initiatives are often driven by alternative values, like care, reciprocity, stewardship and responsibility, and worldviews centred on mutually flourishing relationships between humans and nature, and convivial rather than extractivist and consumerist practices. However, they remain highly localised, which considerably limits their overall impact.

The postdoctoral position will examine and support bottom-up initiatives and support transformative changes aimed at the embedding of biodiversity and climate knowledge within civic structures, institutions, and everyday practices. To this end, they will identify innovative forms of organisation and governance and investigate ways of imagining alternative futures and scaling alternatives. They will also develop innovative transdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to create interstitial spaces where change is being prototyped towards realising wider place-based transformations across urban, rural and rurban spaces.

Key objectives:

1. Conduct fieldwork, interviews, and stakeholder analysis for actors involved in biodiversity and climate change initiatives in The Netherlands. Investigate relevant public policies, socio-cultural factors, social practices, and institutions relevant for biodiversity and climate measures and how values, interests, goals, and frictions hinder or enable transformative change;
2. Explore relevant theories and concepts that allow the analysis of existing alternative initiatives in cities and regions with transformative potential for biodiversity and climate measures (e.g., degrowth, postgrowth, pre-figuration, post-figuration, conviviality, commons). Develop a conceptual and methodological lens to analyse and animate societal and spatial transformations that builds on local alternative initiatives towards repatterning landscapes, public space, economies and everyday life;
3. Use creative approaches and transdisciplinary arts-based methods to elicit, map, and conduct a live archiving of situated biodiversity and climate knowledge to support local stewardship, inspire community-driven visions of biodiverse and climate resilient urban / peri-urban futures, and co-design transformative pathways and policy-action plans;
4. Develop innovative citizen science monitoring and public events to support networking, knowledge-sharing and dissemination in the context of activating the embedding to embed and promote biodiversity stewardship and climate-relevant local knowledge within everyday practices.

The postdoctoral position is embedded within two NWA projects funded by the Dutch research Council: “Planting seeds for biodiverse and just rurban futures: Realizing a knowledge infrastructure for biodiversity commons” (NWA Innovative projects within the Green Route); and “COMBINED: Combatting biodiversity loss and improving climate change resilience through evidence-based, integrated, and adaptive landscape governance in the Netherlands” (NWA Climate and Nature). In COMBINED, 24 societal organization and knowledge institutes, including municipalities, NGOs, businesses and (applied) universities, team up to simultaneously tackle climate change and biodiversity loss in the Netherlands. COMBINED aims to generate new insights and to develop tools to be implemented in landscapes with grasslands, forests and urban areas a just way, considering policy goals, values and interests of society. In COMBINED we operate as a team and work jointly on project activities across landscapes, building upon each other's expertise and experiences. For more information on the project [https://www.combined-project.eu/].

The successful candidates will be affiliated with the RUrban Futures Collective of the Department of Technology, Policy, and Society, at the University of Twente. The Collective takes a critical and transdisciplinary approach to sustainability transformations, addressing the role of science and technology in the context of existing and potential future rural-urban interactions. The positions will be embedded in a vibrant work environment with diverse research projects addressing rurban themes and opportunities for collaboration and exchange across diverse disciplines and sections. In particular, the postdocs will collaborate with a research team based at TPS including Dr. Steven McGreevy, Dr. Corelia Baibarac-Duigan and Prof. Esther Turnhout. Opportunities for collaboration will extend to ITC, the University of Twente’s Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, through Prof. Wieteke Willemen.

EngD position: Design and evaluation of a membrane process for the recovery of ethanol from high pH media

In Europe alone, each year hundreds of million tons of valuable materials are lost in industrial processing. To increase the yield of these processes, it is important to reduce and/or valorise waste streams. Therefore, various processes that involve the use of alcohols as (anti)solvents and the application of pH switches to recover and purify valuable compounds from waste streams in the biotech and chemical industry have been developed. However, the recovery of (anti)solvents using conventional techniques like distillation requires large amounts of energy.

Membrane technology could be an alternative separation technology to make the biotech, chemical and other industries more circular, flexible and energy-efficient.

The Recircanol project was set up to study the recovery of ethanol from alkaline-ethanol media at high pH using membrane technology. In this project, Greencovery, Pervatech, SolSep, Nobian, ISPT and the University of Twente closely collaborate to generate new scientific and technological knowledge on pH-stable and solvent-resistant nanofiltration membranes for use at alkaline conditions, and on pervaporation membranes for the purification of valuable components and/or the recovery of (anti)solvents.

As EngD student in the Recircanol project, you will:

• Design membrane-based separation processes for the recovery of ethanol from alkaline-ethanol media at high pH, with a special focus on Greencovery’s process.
• Perform lab- and/or module-scale nanofiltration experiments to support or validate your process design with real measurement data.
• Assess the techno-economic feasibility of your designed processes for use in industrial applications characterized by extreme pH.

You will work closely together with the PhD student in the project, who scientifically evaluates nanofiltration membranes and membrane modules.

The Recircanol project is funded via the Top consortium for Knowledge and Innovation (TKI) Energy and Industry. You will closely collaborate with all partners in the project, but particularly with Greencovery.

This position will give you ample opportunities to collaborate with other EngD and PhD students within the Membrane Science & Technology department.

EngD position: Inspection and Maintenance Methodologies for Rail Defects

The Challenge

Maintenance of railway assets is if vital importance to ensure safe and cost effective operation. This is in particular valid for intensively used railway networks such as those in The Netherlands. Intensive use increases wear and hence the need for maintenance, while at the same time, it limits the available time for maintenance operations, or inevitably causes disruptions of the normal operation that should be kept to a minimum. Various inspection techniques are applied, ranging from manual inspections to Eddy current and ultrasound based inspections and various maintenance techniques (grinding, milling, replacement) are available.

The main scientific challenge in this project is that a thorough understanding of the different inspection techniques as well as the possible maintenance techniques is required to align both and realize the right conditions to implement them in a maintenance planning system. Lacking experience with these methods in field applications is contributing to the challenge. In addition, it is unknown what the effects are of changes in type of maintenance intervention (grinding, milling, replacement) in the long run. Finally the insight in conditions under which an optimized maintenance intervention strategy, including the question which inspection technology to use when, can be obtained is limited. These are fundamental challenges.

Your role:

• Participate in cutting-edge research and design under the guidance of leading experts in the field.
• Evaluate inspections systems: evaluate and assess the accuracy and reliability of both train-borne and manual inspection systems.
• Analyse maintenance processes: review and analyze current procedures for defect assessment and investigate the opportunities of modern corrective maintenance techniques.
• Develop a Defect Management Framework: categorization of defects and support for decision making of maintenance interventions based on the defect categorization.
• Evaluate the designed framework and propose updates to RLN00399: provide recommendations for updating the RLN00399 guideline and ensure the frameworks supports updates of the guideline reflecting the integration of advanced inspection technologies and modern maintenance practices.
• Collaborate with an interdisciplinary team, including members from the University of Twente and the industrial partner ProRail.
• Actively engage in field inspections to gain necessary insights in the daily practice of inspection and maintenance interventions.
• Work regularly at the ProRail office in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Postdoctoral researcher EU-Concerto project

Are you ready to join our team and together improve our understanding of terrestrial ecosystem carbon uptake on Earth?

The Earth has become greener as a result of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, and the carbon uptake by the vegetation has also increased. Will that process continue, how does vegetation adapt to climate, and what is the role of disturbances such as fires, floods and droughts? And how can we best use satellite data in combination with Earth system models? In the CONCERTO project we work with scientists from institutes in Europe to answer these questions. The University of Twente focuses on the use and interpretation of satellite data, with emphasis on the upcoming FLEX satellite mission.

As researcher in our team, you will have three main tasks in this project, each in collaboration with other institutes. The first is to help improve long-term global land cover maps with satellite data. The second one is to support Earth system modellers with tools to use satellite data of solar induced fluorescence (SIF) and other satellite data, by using and improving radiative transfer models. The third task is to develop theoretical knowledge about the response of photosynthesis to weather, climate and disturbances, using satellite data, the p-model developed at the Imperial College London and the model SCOPE developed at the University of Twente.

In short, this position provides an outstanding chance to work with satellite data and collaborate with European research scientists who work on quantifying ecosystem dynamics and climate projections.