Professor Maria Bermudez-Edo, from the Department of Systems and Software Engineering at the University of Granada, welcomes postdoctoral candidates interested in applying for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (MSCA-IF) in 2020 at this University. Please note that applicants must comply with the Mobility Rule (more information: http://sl.ugr.es/0aNV).

Brief description of the institution:

The University of Granada (UGR), founded in 1531, is one of the largest and most important universities in Spain. The UGR has been awarded with the "Human Resources Excellence in Research (HRS4R)", which reflects the UGR’s commitment to continuously improve its human resource policies in line with the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers. The UGR is also a leading institution in research, located in the top 5/10 of Spanish universities by a variety of ranking criteria, such as national R&D projects, fellowships awarded, publications, or international funding.

UGR is one of the few Spanish Universities listed in the Shanghai Top 500 ranking (http://sl.ugr.es/0aw0). The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) places the UGR in 268th position in the world and as the 4th highest ranked University in Spain, reaffirming its position as an institution at the forefront of national and international research. From the perspective of specialist areas in the ARWU rankings, the UGR is outstanding in Documentation (ranked in the 36th in the world) or Food science technology (ranked 37th in the world), Mathematics and Computer Science (ranked among the top 76-100 in the world).

The UGR has 4 researchers at the top of the Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list in the Computer Science area. With regard to broader subject fields, the UGR is ranked in 45th position in the universities worldwide in the discipline of Engineering. It is also well recognized for its web presence (http://sl.ugr.es/0a6i) taking 36th place in the top 200 Universities in Europe. Internationally, we bet decidedly by our participation in the calls of the Framework Programme of the European Union. For the duration of the last two Framework Programmes, the UGR has obtained a total of 66 projects, with total funding of 18.02 million euros, and for H2020, 80 projects with total funding around 20.6 million euros.

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group

The 2019 ARWU places the UGR as the fourth-highest ranked university in Spain and as among the top 300 universities on the globe. In particular, in Computer Science & Engineering it ranks on the global top 76-100. +60K students follow graduate and postgraduate degrees. UGR hosts a large population of Erasmus students (ca. 2k).

Research Centre for Information and Communications Technologies of the UGR (CITIC-UGR) has built up a strong reputation as an international ICT Centre. The CITIC-UGR works on relevant scientific and technological challenges, transfers knowledge to the productive sector and trains researchers to be engines of socio-economic growth thanks to new technologies. The research lines includes: High Performance Architectures, Bioinformatics, eHealth, Software Engineering, Neural Engineering, Data Mining, Nanoelectronics, Cell Networks and Sensors, Image Recognition, Control Systems, Signal Processing, Virtual Reality and Soft Computing and Artificial Vision. In addition, the Centre offers a PhD programme in Information and Communications Technologies.

The Mydass research group is focused on using TIC to improve the quality life of children with special needs and elders, including active aging. Mydass works in close collaboration with Health specialists. In particular we apply technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), semantics and microservices architectures to create accessible and personalized apps to help people with special needs.

Project description

The project seeks to unleash the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) to transform the lives of older people, and to enable them to stay active, healthy, and independent for longer. This concept is possible thanks to an IoT infrastructure that allows the ecological (collecting data while the users are performing their activities of daily living (ADL), in their real environment) and holistic (taking into account physiological, environmental and context information) monitoring of physical and cognitive parameters. The main focus of this project is to use IoT to evaluate the performance of activities of daily living by older people, in order to assess their health status. Additionally, a screening tool shows the results, with bespoke outputs for different users, that could be used for peace of mind or to enable early detection of health decay and to start an intervention therapy if necessary.

The project includes the use of IoT technologies, which enables the retrieval of data from sensors and the application of data analytics and visualization of data. The project will explore different data analytics to detect a variety of aging issues.

The benefits for the older people are related to the increase of independence in their ADL through the early prevention of decay due to age. Benefits to informal caregivers include increased information about the physical wellbeing of the older people in their care. The benefits to society are the early prevention of decay, which allows interventions and reduction in health costs and caregiver dependencies.

Research Area

Information Science and Engineering (ENG)

For a correct evaluation of your candidature, please send the documents below to Professor Maria Bermudez-Edo (mbe@ugr.es):

• CV
• Letter of recommendation (optional)