Research Associate

**Grade UE07: £35,333 - £42,155 per annum**

**College of Science and Engineering, School of Informatics**

**Fixed-term: 48 months**

**Full Time: 35 Hours per week**

**The Opportunity**:
**Project Summary**

The core aim of this project is to translate insect visual depth perception to robot systems. The key hypothesis is that newly discovered forms of retinal and receptor motion enable high resolution and stereo vision that has previously been assumed impossible for the insect compound eye, which has a relatively low number of optical elements per visual angle. The key outcome would be the design of a compact, low power visual sensor, and associated processing algorithms, which is particularly suited to distinguish the 3D shape of small nearby objects.

The first objective is to understand in principle what information an insect can recover from a low-resolution sensor array that has individual light-activated motion of receptors and specific coordinated global motion. This will be addressed using multilevel computational modelling, including machine learning methods coupled to biological constraints to gain insight into possible circuit structure. This work will be carried out principally by the RA but in close collaboration with the team at Sheffield who will focus on the second objective, to understand the efficient computation of this information in the insect brain, using neuro-imaging of the fly brain coupled to a track-ball and 3D object simulation system. The third objective, which will be the main task of the RA in the latter half of the project will be to test these principles and understanding through construction and testing of hardware devices, including exploration of novel camera technologies and interaction with industrial partners.

**Principal Duties**

The appointee will be responsible to carry out the research outlined above and also to contribute to the supervision of PhD, masters and undergraduate students who are conducting research in the same scientific areas.

The post will involve:

- Fundamental research in a collaborative team environment,
- Leading the writing and submission process associated with papers at the leading international conferences and journals,
- Attending international conferences to present results,
- Oversight and expert advice for other, more junior staff and research students (including as co-supervisor) as required.

The research will be carried out in the Insect Robotics Group, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.

**Knowledge, skills and experience**

Essential knowledge, skills and experience are:

- PhD degree in computational neuroscience, computer vision, bio-inspired robotics or a closely related field.
- Research expertise in computational modelling.
- Track record of excellent research: publications in high-quality journals.
- Good programming skills in Python
- Ability to work effectively as part of a team, to meet deadlines and to report on project progress.
- Excellence in written and oral communication, analytical, and time management skills

Desirable knowledge, skills and experience are:

- Familiarity with insect behavioural and neural biology
- Experience with computational modelling that links neural systems to behaviour
- Experience or knowledge of electronic hardware.
- Familiarity with platforms such as PyNN, ROS, OpenAI Gym, Gazebo

Click here for a copy of the full job description

**As a valued member of our team you can expect**:
An exciting, positive, creative, challenging and rewarding place to work. We give you support, nurture your talent and reward success. You will benefit from a competitive reward package and a wide range of staff benefits, which includes a generous holiday entitlement, a defined benefits **pension scheme **, **staff discounts, **family friendly initiatives **, flexible working and much more. Access our **staff benefits page **for further information and use our **reward calculator **to find out the total value of pay and benefits provided.

The University of Edinburgh holds a Silver Athena SWAN award in recognition of our commitment to advance gender equality in higher education. We are members of the Race Equality Charter and we are also Stonewall Scotland Diversity Champions, actively promoting LGBT equality.

If invited for interview you will be required to evidence your right to work in the UK. Further information is available on our **right to work **webpages

As a world-leading research-intensive University, we are here to address tomorrow’s greatest challenges. Between now and 2030 we will do that with a values-led approach to teaching, research and innovation, and through the strength of our relationships, both locally and globally.

Informatics is the study of how natural and artificial systems store, process and communicate information. Research in Informatics promises to take information technology to a new level, and to place information at the heart of 21st century science, te