Management assistant Executive Board

Do you have secretarial experience and keep your cool in sometimes dynamic situations? Are you organizationally sensitive, entrepreneurial, and a real team player? And do you want to work for a growing organization with global impact at a beautiful green campus in the new year? Then keep reading for this exciting role as a management assistant!

We are looking for:
A colleague to join the executive secretariat of the Animal Sciences Group (ASG) in Wageningen, primarily working for the General Director. As a management assistant, you will have a varied range of tasks within a complex organization that can be hectic at times. You will create and maintain an overview of complex information flows and numerous meetings. If you join us, your responsibilities will include:

• Managing the General Director’s calendar;
• Organizing larger meetings;
• Preparing, taking minutes, and tracking follow-up actions from meetings;
• Placing orders and checking invoices;
• Preparing documents, checking spelling, and archiving them.

You will work closely with two management/office assistants of the executive secretariat, based in Lelystad and Wageningen, for the two directors and staff members of the Animal Science Group.

PhD Artificial Intelligence and sensor-fusion systems in Sustainable robotics for precision agriculture

This project is part of AIGreenBots (MSCA-DN project funded by the European Union), dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence, robotics, and related technologies for precision agriculture. The project's main goal is to develop and train a new generation of PhD researchers in agricultural robotics through an interdisciplinary and international framework, addressing key areas such as sustainable robotics, precision agriculture, and digital farming.

Within AIGreenBots, you will focus on active perception that plays a crucial role in agricultural robotics, where sensing is required be closely integrated with decision making and robotic control to deal with complex and dynamic environments. You will explore use cases in agriculture where sensing needs to be directly linked to action in real-time.
In the project, two types of active-perception will be developed:

• (i) next-best-view planning to decide on the next viewpoint based on an analysis of previously acquired sensing data and prior knowledge.
• (ii) closed-loop control using sensor feedback to control a robot in a dynamic, changing environment.

Objectives:

1. Develop an active perception system that integrates high-frequency sensors with standard cameras or LiDAR sensors into real-time robotic control.
2. Create a demonstrator that shows next-best-view and closed-loop control on tree with a robotic arm.
3. Utilize the XR platform to validate active perception, comparing with human guided control and human feedback.
4. Implement the developed algorithms on Edge AI Chip technology for field deployment.

Expected Results:

• Literature review on active perception in agriculture.
• Development of active perception where sensor and robot action are connected using edge AI that can react real-time toward changed conditions.
• Publication of results by creating patents, journal or in top conferences.

Keywords: robotic perception; machine learning; multi-sensor fusion.

The secondments that offer your valuable opportunities to enhance your skills and foster international collaboration planned in this research project are:

• Spotlite (PT): to work on active perception, edge AI models, and evaluation on remote sensing use-case.
• Instituto Politecnico de Coimbra (PT): dataset collection and validation on real agricultural conditions (Living Lab).

PhD Learning Transferable skills for agriculture robots

This project is part of AIGreenBots (MSCA-DN project funded by the European Union), dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence, robotics, and related technologies for precision agriculture. The project's main goal is to develop and train a new generation of PhD researchers in agricultural robotics through an interdisciplinary and international framework, addressing key areas such as sustainable robotics, precision agriculture, and digital farming.

Within AIGreenBots, you will develop innovative methods for decision-making within a collaborative humanrobot framework, leveraging the immersive capabilities of eXtended Reality. To begin, you will integrate the outcomes of sensors and semantic labels. These technologies will serve as the foundation for creating a virtual environment that seamlessly interfaces with a robotic arm, facilitating tasks like branch pruning and fruit thinning. The primary objective is to establish an environment in which robotics can learn from human actions and gradually assume decision-making roles based on real-time human data inputs These algorithms will be carefully designed to prioritise safety, while optimising operational efficiency within the collaborative humanrobot ecosystem.

Objectives:

1. Explore learning by demonstration using eXtended Reality and Robotics.
2. Design a framework for Agriculture where sensors and actuators can be easily integrated for both Human control with XR and automatic decision algorithms.
3. Develop the software to bring both XR/learning by demonstration/automatic decision making in one framework.
4. Create a demonstrator that shows the concept of learning with XR how to prune trees. For validation, new trees can be recorded with the developed sensor platform and the robot can interact with the human in its decision making.
5. Explore (planned secondment) the XR platform as extended to use-cases where human can do some initial decision making from where the ML takes over.

Expected Results:

• Literature review on Robotic, eXtended Reality, Decision making and learning from demonstration toward a PhD proposal.
• Creating an eXtended Reality environment where both sensing and inference results can be visualised, and robotics action can be taken by humans to learn the decision making.
• Generate results to be disseminated in patents, top conferences and journals.

Keywords: robotic perception; machine learning; eXtended Reality.

The secondments that offer your valuable opportunities to enhance your skills and foster international collaboration planned in this research project are:

• Instituto Politecnico de Coimbra (PT) to work on skill transfer applied to real environments.
• Critical Software S.A. (PT) to work on skill transfer in cognitive and ML-perception.

Technical Assistant

Are you an enthusiastic and analytical professional? Do you enjoy collaboration and are you familiar with research and education in physics or physical chemistry? If so, we are looking for you!

You will coordinate and assist in the practical aspects of education, support students and PhD candidates in using the equipment within our group, and ensure the maintenance of our equipment.
You will test new equipment before purchase and assist in data collection for specific research activities.
You are also responsible for the procurement and management of chemicals and small laboratory equipment.

Senior HR Business Partner

Ben je als senior HR business partner innovatief, pro-actief en vind je het leuk om (organisatie)veranderingen in gang te zetten? Bouw je graag mee aan de vormgeving van onze HR-dienstverlening? Dan zijn wij op zoek naar jou!

Binnen ons HR-team van de Plant Sciences Group ontwikkel je teams en de organisatie als geheel, en draag je bij aan de ontwikkeling van integraal HR-beleid. Daarbij adviseer en ondersteun jij verschillende onderwijs- en onderzoeksgroepen bij de implementatie hiervan. Je bouwt aan professionele werkrelaties met leidinggevenden en geeft samen met het Center of Expertise (CoE) invulling aan de strategie & tactiek van Recruitment, Vital & Health en Learning & Development. Jouw uitdagingen liggen binnen PSG op het vlak van organisatie ontwikkeling en -veranderingen.

Jouw taken en verantwoordelijkheden als senior HR business partner zijn:

• Sparringpartner en adviseur voor leidinggevenden en/of directie op organisatieontwikkeling en teamcasuïstiek niveau;
• meedenken en een actieve rol spelen bij de ontwikkeling en uitvoering van strategische personeelsplannen en organisatievraagstukken;
• invulling geven aan de HR-agenda en (mede) verantwoordelijkheid voor de succesvolle implementatie van HR-beleid PSG-breed; de focus ligt de komende jaren op organisatie ontwikkelingen, cultuurverandering, diversiteit en inclusie en talent ontwikkeling
• deelnemen in diverse HR-projecten. Bijvoorbeeld op het gebied van Leiderschap, Organizational Design, Diversity & Inclusion, Social Safety of Recognition & Rewards.

Jouw team
Jij gaat direct samenwerken met ons gedreven HR team PSG wat bestaat uit ongeveer 15 collega’s. Als team proberen wij samen een cultuur te creëren waarbij collegialiteit, authenticiteit en samenwerking belangrijke pijlers zijn. Een informele omgang met elkaar en humor zijn daarbij erg belangrijk. Met z’n allen streven we naar het creëren van een open en transparante cultuur. Als team vinden wij het belangrijk dat je samen de schouders eronder wil zetten en mee wilt bouwen aan de verdere professionalisering van onze dienstverlening.

De afdeling HR werkt op verschillende locaties in het land, waaronder Lelystad, Bleiswijk en Randwijk. Je bent dus bereid om af en toe, en in overleg, te reizen binnen je functie, maar je werkt (voornamelijk) in Wageningen. Je werktijden kan je zelf indelen, in overleg uiteraard.

PSG bestaat uit het Departement Plantwetenschappen (21 leerstoelgroepen), dat fundamenteel onderzoek doet en onderwijs geeft, en uit Wageningen Plant Research (8 WPR teams), dat toegepast onderzoek doet. PSG is zeer internationaal georiënteerd in zowel medewerkers, onderwijs en onderzoek.