PhD Position Data-Driven Understanding of World Heritage Cities

at  TU Delft

JOB DESCRIPTION

The cultural significance of UNESCO World Heritage is conventionally only defined by the experts and decision-makers. In the past decade, however, social inclusion and public participation have been growing as goals in heritage management. As proposed by the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, it is important to document and map the knowledge from a broader public to facilitate more inclusive heritage decision-making processes. People constantly share on social media platforms their perceptions about the cities that they visit or reside, in forms of texts, images, and videos. The ubiquitous geo-located and time-stamped user-generated data and the current advances in data science and AI makes it possible to understand how people perceive the historical urban spaces at large scale, especially those where World Heritage properties are located. This bottom-up knowledge will be informative both for the conservation and management of existing heritage, and for the recognition and nomination of new heritage.
Your interdisciplinary research will study how data science and AI can help understand the perception of world heritage cities by citizens at global level. You will collect and analyse a global dataset of user-generated data (written texts and/or posted images) from social media platforms in cities in part listed as UNESCO World Heritage properties. You will develop analytical frameworks to study both the spatiotemporal patterns (how the data are distributed in space and developed along time) and the semantic contents (what are being discussed) of the dataset. Using the obtained knowledge, you will be able to offer spatial design frameworks and planning suggestions for heritage conservation and urban [re]development.
As a PhD candidate, you will be based in the Section of Heritage and Architecture within the Architectural Engineering and Technology Department at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft. Within the section, we conduct research focusing on the values that define heritage and how they impact the sustainability of cities. We are keen to explore cross-disciplinary research methods with global collaborations. You will also be working together with colleagues from the Section of Digital Technologies and other AI labs of the faculty and TU Delft. You will work closely with Dr. Nan Bai, whose research focuses on sensing the World Heritage with big data and AI.
In the department of Architectural Engineering + Technology we currently have 6 PhD positions open.
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At TU Delft we embrace diversity as one of our core values and we actively engage to be a university where you feel at home and can flourish. We value different perspectives and qualities. We believe this makes our work more innovative, the TU Delft community more vibrant and the world more just. Together, we imagine, invent and create solutions using technology to have a positive impact on a global scale. That is why we invite you to apply. Your application will receive fair consideration.
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Please refer the Job description for details