JOB DESCRIPTION

Research context
The North Sea is one of the world’s busiest maritime regions, witnessing a continual surge in utilization for both navigation and renewable energy ventures. With the rising demand for renewable energy, more wind parks are being planned and developed in this domain, creating a complex challenge: how to integrate these new functions while maintaining nautical safety. Balancing the urge to expand renewable energy initiatives while ensuring nautical safety remains a key concern. Addressing this challenge necessitates innovative approaches, utilizing new technologies, and interdisciplinary collaborations.
In response to these challenges, a collaboration has been forged between Rijkswaterstaat, Coastguard, and TU Delft through a data-sharing and support agreement. This alliance signifies a concerted effort to explore, analyze, and address the complex interplay between the utilization of the North Sea for renewable energy endeavors and the imperative to maintain and enhance nautical safety standards. Under this collaborative agreement, the Sea and Shipping AI research program has been initiated. Co-financed by the Rijkswaterstaat, the overarching goal is to harness the potential of advanced data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence techniques to enhance sea and shipping performance. This initiative aims to investigate, innovate, and develop strategies that augment the performance and operational efficiency of sea and shipping activities within the North Sea while simultaneously ensuring the highest standards of safety and sustainability.
The initiative encompasses two research roles: a PhD position focusing on strategic and operational aspects of sea infrastructure and a Postdoctoral position dedicated to creating a novel working environment. This includes setting up skill beds for testing and refining new methodologies to address challenges in maritime management. Together, these roles support the program’s broader goal of improving North Sea infrastructure through research and application.
Job Description
The primary responsibility of this 2-year postdoctoral position will be to develop a novel working environment that incorporates the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and leverages access to new data sources. This innovative working environment will at least include setting up of skill beds, and providing a dynamic platform for testing and assessing new data-driven methodologies across a spectrum of challenges within the Maritime Sector.

Your focus will be on creating a collaborative space where AI models and methods can be tested comprehensively. You will create a hub for “Sea Infrastructure State and Use” AI problems. By leading the way in creating well-organized test cases, such as:

• Reconstructions of past shipping incidents (Data fusion)
• Detection of sea infrastructure changes using satellite images (CNN)
• Creating virtual ships that react to the environment and consume energy like real ships (Digital Twins)

• Creating virtual captains that act like real captains (RL)Detecting anomalous behavior on the North Sea (Embedding, Manifold methods)

• Using existing platforms like Hugging Face and the Delft Blue cluster you can help scientists and practitioners to focus on real problems with real impact. By creating an organized workflow where new methods are continuously benchmarked and made available for reuse you will help to accelerate the research field as a whole. Through your leadership, this working environment will become a hub for experimentation, ensuring that new methodologies are rigorously evaluated for their effectiveness in solving complex issues related to safety, logistics, and infrastructure management. This position offers a unique opportunity to be at the heart of shaping the future of North Sea functions by establishing a foundation for the practical application of innovative AI solutions.

JOB REQUIREMENTS

We are looking for an excellent candidate who is eager to apply state-of-the-art analysis techniques in a real-world practical context. This position requires extensive expertise in artificial intelligence and working with big datasets. In particular, we look for a candidate with:

• A PhD degree in Civil Engineering, Maritime Engineering, Transport and Infrastructure, Logistics, or any other related field
• Advanced skills in applying AI models and big data analytics to diverse data sources
• Extensive expertise in scripting with Python
• Affinity with maritime applications, nautical traffic, and safety issues, including the ability to couple hydrometeo aspects to ship response and behavior, and translate this information to nautical safety impacts
• Affinity with agent-based and discrete-event simulation
• Affinity with AIS data is a plus
• Experience in setting up databases in a plus
• Ability to work in a collaborative, multidisciplinary environment both with scientific partners and stakeholders from industry

Please refer the Job description for details