1 Postdoctoral position on Collecting, Analyzing and Visualizing Big Social Data Using the Web and Smartphones in Switzerland | ETH Zürich

Prof. Helbing’s Chair of Sociology at ETH Zurich, in particular of Modeling and Simulation, hosts a team bringing together sociologists, physicists, mathematicians, economists, political scientists, and computer scientists to work on fundamental scientific questions regarding socially interactive systems using quantitative approaches. In particular, the team uses a combination of formal modeling, simulation, data mining, and behavioral experiments to understand the way our society works.

Postdoc

with a strong background in computer science to strengthen our interdisciplinary team in the areas of Web science, Big Data analytics, smartphone platforms, and distributed computing. The goals of this project include designing a "Planetary Nervous System" that would give us a detailed real-time view of the world, crawling and analyzing web content on a large scale, and establishing a smartphone platform for gathering scientific data. The successful applicant is expected to actively interact with other team members from different disciplines and to acquire a high-level understanding of the general topics in quantitative social sciences, sociophysics, and related areas.

The candidate should possess excellent programming skills and have experience in one or more fields related to Big Data analytics, smartphone programming, distributed high-performance computing, web crawling, and/or machine learning. Experience with modeling, simulation, complex systems, or game theory is a plus. Excellent English language skills, social skills, team spirit, and international experience are needed, and the candidate should appreciate to work in a highly interdisciplinary and multicultural team.