GREENCYCLESII
Vacancies in related projects
Research Associate - Land Use Modelling, University of Cambridge, UK
A position exists for a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in land use modelling within the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR), to work as part of a project on integrated climate impacts assessment, funded by the Three Guineas Trust.
The aim of this post is to incorporate a model of land use and land use change into an integrated climate impacts assessment framework, to gain further understanding of the role of land use in climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.
The successful candidate will have a PhD in a relevant discipline, (e.g. geography, economics, agriculture, agronomy, engineering), and will have strong numerical modelling skills, as well as a knowledge of human land use activities and related economics, and of terrestrial ecosystem processes. Familiarity with a high level programming language, such as FORTRAN or C, would be helpful. Experience of working with large scale computational models, ideally land use models, would be advantageous.
Further details may be downloaded from http://www.landecon.cam.ac.uk/vacancies.html or can be obtained by contacting Louise Segar (les40@cam.ac.uk).
Applications should include a cover letter, a CV, and a completed form CHRIS 6 Parts I and III (from http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/hr/forms/chris6/) with the contact details for two referees. These should be sent to Louise Segar (les40@cam.ac.uk)
* The funds for this post are available until 31 December 2014 in the first instance.
Quote Reference: JP28362,Closing Date: 28 May 2013
3-month internship - Inferring the earth system, now and into the future.
Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
Society urgently requires accurate predictions of how the living systems of the earth are going to interact-with and influence climate change. Unfortunately earth system models have not been built in a formal probabilistic framework, making it unclear how much confidence to place in their predictions. Our Computational Ecology group is working on constructing models of the living systems of the earth while accurately quantifying uncertainty in the source data, the models, and their predictions. The goal is to enable more accurate predictions by providing a framework for the earth system modelling community to rapidly develop and simulate models and robustly quantify their predictive accuracy. The adoption of accessible computational methods for the required Bayesian inference will be an important part of the success of this project. Our Machine Learning and Perception group is working on such general frameworks for Bayesian inference, one of which is the Infer.NET framework. However, to date, the potential benefits to the earth-system modelling community of adopting Infer.NET as a framework has not been explored. In this internship you will work with both the Computational Ecology and Machine Learning and Perception groups to explore the extent to which their research into improving earth system models might benefit from using Infer.NET for Bayesian inference. The project will have two main tasks i) To construct a graphical model of a simplified earth system model which the Computational Ecology group has already developed and ii) to use Infer.NET to perform Bayesian inference on that model. The intended outcomes will be one or two scientific papers reporting the findings of this research.
This is a 3 month paid internship at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK and would ideally suit PhD/Masters level students with a statistics background. Please contact Matthew.Smith@microsoft.com for more details.