Four open PhD Positions at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

Subject : Mapping Associative Urban Processes to a suitable Software Methodology

This offering relates to the field of urbanism. The character of the positions is shaped by research in the intersection of urbanism, architecture, programming and machine learning.

This project forms a sub-theme under the Simulation Platform Stream of the Future Cities Project, a joint venture of the Department of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETHZ, and the National University Singapore.

The Chair for CAAD within the Institute for Technology in Architecture ITA at the Faculty of Architecture, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETHZ has an opening for four PhD candidates interested in transdisciplinary research in the field of urbanism, comprising primarily technical research work in the form of programming, though possibly including theoretical and/or empirical work based on the principles known from humanities as well.

The research will take place in the context of the Future Cities Laboratory Simulation Platform (SP), which the ETHZ and the National University of Singapore NUS are running for the next 5 years.

Area of Research
The research area assigned to the Institute for Technology in Architecture is “Service and Research for Future Planning Environments.” Within this work package the chair for CAAD is conducting research on operationalizing concepts of associativity in the context of urbanism and city-design. Highly-developed derivatives of the Self-Organizing Map, as introduced by Kohonen and others, and evolutionary computational procedures serve as the main operational conceptual foundation.

With respect to the context of urbanism we are interested in the operationalization of various concepts by means of the creation of domain-specific data adapters, in particular for textual and project data (ref-nr. SP07), images (ref-nr. SP08), topological data about urban flows (ref-nr. SP09) or various data formats collected by crowd-sourcing or in „Web of Things“ approaches (ref-nr. SP10), and concerning scales from buildings to urban landscapes. The work on these objectives will be embedded into an already existing software architecture.