Job Reference
382_24_DIR_CSS_RE1
Position
Research Assistant for an ERC Project in Digital Social Ecology (RE1)
Closing Date
Wednesday, 31 July, 2024
Reference: 382_24_DIR_CSS_RE1
Job title: Research Assistant for an ERC Project in Digital Social Ecology (RE1)
About BSC
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, was a founding and hosting member of the former European HPC infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and is now hosting entity for EuroHPC JU, the Joint Undertaking that leads large-scale investments and HPC provision in Europe. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof, and currently has over 1000 staff from 60 countries.
Look at the BSC experience:
BSC-CNS YouTube Channel
Let's stay connected with BSC Folks!
We are particularly interested for this role in the strengths and lived experiences of women and underrepresented groups to help us avoid perpetuating biases and oversights in science and IT research. In instances of equal merit, the incorporation of the under-represented sex will be favoured.
Look at the BSC experience:
BSC-CNS YouTube Channel
Let's stay connected with BSC Folks!
We are particularly interested for this role in the strengths and lived experiences of women and underrepresented groups to help us avoid perpetuating biases and oversights in science and IT research. In instances of equal merit, the incorporation of the under-represented sex will be favoured.
Context And Mission
The Computational Social Science programme envisions preparing the social sciences and humanities for the era of data, artificial intelligence (AI), and Exascale supercomputing. Our mission is to foster collaboration between social scientists and computer scientists, making high-performance computing (HPC) accessible to all researchers in the field. Through innovative approaches, we aim to apply social science research to contribute valuable insights for informed policymaking.
In our pursuit, we focus on a wide-range of key societal research areas such as Population changes and living arrangements, Democratic Quality, Social Media and Information Environment, Social-Ecology, Education and Labor Market, Law technologies, Social Innovation, and History and Cultural Heritage. Employing a mixed of complex statistical models, AI/Machine Learning, Large Language Models (LLMs), Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), Social Network Analysis (SNA), among others, our advanced computational methods are applied to diverse datasets from official statistics, surveys, social media, news, laws, historical archives, current data archives, citizens' volunteered data, government and industry data.
As a sub-group to the Computational Social Science programme, the Digital Social Ecology research group seeks to deepen our understanding of how digital platforms and technologies are reshaping human-environment interactions. Employing a social-ecological-technological systems approach, the group will explore complex interconnections between the digital, natural, and human systems. The objective is to provide foundational knowledge as well as actionable insights to understand complexity and to tackle wicked problems across the societal goals of sustainability, resilience, and justice in a digitalizing global society. The group aims to train a new generation of researchers able to bridge and broker between high-performance computational and social-environmental research.
We are looking for a dynamic and creative Research Assistant for The BIG-5 project, a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council. The project argues that the internet is an overlooked factor in multiplying nature experiences, creating nature values, and fostering environmental stewardship, thus counteracting the ‘extinction of experiences’ of nature. It is carried out as a collaboration between two Spanish Centers of excellence: the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (Autonomous University of Barcelona).
As a Research Assistant, you will be responsible for data acquisition and preparation tasks, as well as developing ML models and providing programming support to the team. You’ll be reporting to the Principal Investigator Dr Johannes Langemeyer.
In our pursuit, we focus on a wide-range of key societal research areas such as Population changes and living arrangements, Democratic Quality, Social Media and Information Environment, Social-Ecology, Education and Labor Market, Law technologies, Social Innovation, and History and Cultural Heritage. Employing a mixed of complex statistical models, AI/Machine Learning, Large Language Models (LLMs), Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), Social Network Analysis (SNA), among others, our advanced computational methods are applied to diverse datasets from official statistics, surveys, social media, news, laws, historical archives, current data archives, citizens' volunteered data, government and industry data.
As a sub-group to the Computational Social Science programme, the Digital Social Ecology research group seeks to deepen our understanding of how digital platforms and technologies are reshaping human-environment interactions. Employing a social-ecological-technological systems approach, the group will explore complex interconnections between the digital, natural, and human systems. The objective is to provide foundational knowledge as well as actionable insights to understand complexity and to tackle wicked problems across the societal goals of sustainability, resilience, and justice in a digitalizing global society. The group aims to train a new generation of researchers able to bridge and broker between high-performance computational and social-environmental research.
We are looking for a dynamic and creative Research Assistant for The BIG-5 project, a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council. The project argues that the internet is an overlooked factor in multiplying nature experiences, creating nature values, and fostering environmental stewardship, thus counteracting the ‘extinction of experiences’ of nature. It is carried out as a collaboration between two Spanish Centers of excellence: the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (Autonomous University of Barcelona).
As a Research Assistant, you will be responsible for data acquisition and preparation tasks, as well as developing ML models and providing programming support to the team. You’ll be reporting to the Principal Investigator Dr Johannes Langemeyer.
Key Duties
- Data acquisition from social platforms
- Data preparation for human and computational assessments
- Development of machine learning approaches for automated assessment of picture and text analysis
- Programming support to the research team
Requirements
-
Education
- MSc in Computational Science or related
- MSc in Computational Science or related
-
Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Data gathering and organization
- System administration
- Backend and frontend development
- Natural language processing
- Machine learning approaches (image and text)
- Experience in Computational Social Science
- Data gathering and organization
-
Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Diversity in programming languages
- Science visualization
- Good communication skills in English. (verbal and written)
- Highly valuable to have good communication skills in Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese
-
Competences
- Interdisciplinarity
- Independency
- Leadership
- Creativity
Conditions
- The position will be located at BSC within the Directors Department
- We offer a full-time contract (37.5h/week), a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state-of-the-art infrastructure, flexible working hours, extensive training plan, restaurant tickets, private health insurance, support to the relocation procedures
- Duration: Open-ended contract due to technical and scientific activities linked to the project and budget duration
- Holidays: 23 paid vacation days plus 24th and 31st of December per our collective agreement
- Salary: we offer a competitive salary commensurate with the qualifications and experience of the candidate and according to the cost of living in Barcelona
- Starting date: 01/09/2024
Applications procedure and process
All applications must be made through BSC website and contain:
A full CV in English including contact details
A Cover Letter with a statement of interest in English, including two contacts for further references - Applications without this document will not be considered
In accordance with the OTM-R principles, a gender-balanced recruitment panel is formed for every vacancy at the beginning of the process. After reviewing the content of the applications, the panel will start the interviews, with at least one technical and one administrative interview. A profile questionnaire as well as a technical exercise may be required during the process.
The panel will make a final decision and all candidates who had contacts with them will receive a feedback with details on the acceptance or rejection of their profile.
At BSC we are seeking continuous improvement in our recruitment processes, for any suggestions or feedback/complaints about our Recruitment Processes, please contact recruitment [at] bsc [dot] es.
For more information follow this link
In accordance with the OTM-R principles, a gender-balanced recruitment panel is formed for every vacancy at the beginning of the process. After reviewing the content of the applications, the panel will start the interviews, with at least one technical and one administrative interview. A profile questionnaire as well as a technical exercise may be required during the process.
The panel will make a final decision and all candidates who had contacts with them will receive a feedback with details on the acceptance or rejection of their profile.
At BSC we are seeking continuous improvement in our recruitment processes, for any suggestions or feedback/complaints about our Recruitment Processes, please contact recruitment [at] bsc [dot] es.
For more information follow this link
Deadline
The vacancy will remain open until a suitable candidate has been hired. Applications will be regularly reviewed and potential candidates will be contacted.
OTM-R principles for selection processes
BSC-CNS is committed to the principles of the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers of the European Commission and the Open, Transparent and Merit-based Recruitment principles (OTM-R). This is applied for any potential candidate in all our processes, for example by creating gender-balanced recruitment panels and recognizing career breaks etc.
BSC-CNS is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. We are pleased to consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability or any other basis protected by applicable state or local law.
For more information follow this link
BSC-CNS is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. We are pleased to consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability or any other basis protected by applicable state or local law.
For more information follow this link