Hosting Information
- Offer Deadline
- EU Research Framework Programme
- H2020 / Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Country
- Spain
- City
- Padova
Organisation/Institute
- Organisation / Company
- Università degli Studi di Padova
- Department
- Institute of New Imaging Technologies
- Is the Hosting related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?
- No
Contact Information
- Organisation / Company Type
- Higher Education Institute
- Website
- concorsi.docenti@unipd.itmontoliu@uji.es
- State/Province
- Padova
- Postal Code
- 35123
- Street
- Riviera Tito Livio n. 6
- Phone
Description
Brief description of the institution:
The Universitat Jaume I in Castelló (UJI), founded in 1991, is the public university serving the north of the
Valencian Community (Spain). UJI is now among the Top 500 universities in the world, according to the
Academic Ranking of World Universities 2017 (ARWU), conducted by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy.
The UJI hosts over 14,000 students and more than 2,000 researchers distributed in 27 university departments
and 13 research institutes. Our university offers 32 undergraduate degrees, 47 State-regulated master’s
degrees, 21 UJI-specific master’s degrees and 20 doctoral programmes. In this regard UJI has obtained a
rating of excellence in teaching and research in the international U-Multirank ranking and the 500+ Gold Seal
of European Excellence by the Excellence in Management Club.
Currently UJI is involved in 18 ongoing European research actions, including several European programmes
(such as H2020, Interreg, SUDOE, LIFE, etc.). The UJI offers modern facilities and services to support
research, such as the Central Scientific Instrumentation Service (SCIC), a Library, the Animal
Experimentation Service (SEA), and the Office for Cooperation in Research and Technological Development
(OCIT).
A specific program for newcomers helps researchers with the administrative procedures in order to become
familiar with the facilities and standard practices, as well as an accurate integration. Moreover researchers
can access additional services such as Sports Service, The University Residence, the Language Learning
Centre (CAL) and the health centre.
Brief description of the Centre/Research Group:
The Institute of New Imaging Technologies (INIT) is an effective instrument to promote and encourage
research activities related to imaging technologies. The INIT main tasks are the development of research with
excellence and quality in order to improve on knowledge, technological innovation and quality of life and
competitiveness of enterprises. The INIT was created under multidisciplinary vocation in order to cover to a
greater or lesser extent every field related to research and development on imaging technologies. In this
respect, the INIT covers several scientific and technical fields, some of them directly reflected on the current
lines of work of the member groups in the institute, and some other areas that will becover as the INIT will
expand its scope. In particular, Dr Montoliu belongs to the Machine Learning for Smart Environments
(GIANT)research group (http://giant.uji.es) whose main research lines are the application and development
of machine learning techniques to smart environments. Some fields of application are indoor positioning,
e-health and the development of new AI in video games.
The GIANT research group is very active on publishing their findings in international journals with high
impact index and has the team, the infrastructure and the motivation to be an excellent place to develop a
research career.
Project description:
The GIANT research group is interested in the development of advanced methods of AI, using video games
as an application field. The two main approaches are the use of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods
and the use of statistical simulation methods such as Monte Carlo TreeSearch (MCTS) and Rolling Horizon
Evolution (RHE). Recently, significant progress has been made in this area, including agents who are able to
learn how to play Atari 2006 games and win the champions of the popular board game Go.DRL is an area of
machine learning inspired by behavioural psychology, whose objective is to determine what actions a
software agent should choose in a given environment in order to maximize a "reward" or accumulated prize.
The MCTS approach consists in the analysis of the most promising movements, expanding the search tree by
means of a random sampling of the search space. RHE is a specialization of evolutionary algorithms. These
algorithms make a population of individuals evolve subjecting it to random actions similar to those that act in
the biological evolution. The individuals more adapted, survive and new ones are created based on them. The
ones less adapted, are discarded. Recently, the combination of these techniques has started to be studied,
demonstrating that it is possible to obtain new methods that get promising results when making decisions
autonomously in traditional video games, also obtaining very good results in international competitions. The
main objective of this project is the study of new ways to combine these techniques in order to improve the
results obtained so far. The application of the methods obtained to other fields of interest for the research
group will also be studied.
Applications
Please submit the next documentation:
- Motivation letter
- CV
- At least one reference letter