Post-doctoral fellowship MINES Saint-Etienne
Join a multicultural team, passionate, internationally recognized in the field of Semantic Web, which will help you to exceed your limits and give the best of yourself!
Integrate the EU ACCORD project (Automated Compliance Checks For Construction, Renovation Or Demolition Works) project, and contribute to the semantisation of regulation and machine-readable rules for digital permitting and compliance processes.
Building permitting Building compliance checking Digital tools Automation Standardisation NLP Machine-readable rules Integrated building processes BIM GIS Semantic data Linked building data
About us
The Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, founded in 1816, is a member of the Institut Mines-Télécom - France's leading group of engineering and management grandes écoles, positioned on the major changes of the 21st century: digital, environmental and energy, industrial and educational transformations.
Saint-Etienne is a welcoming and dynamic city with a wide range of leisure activities (various sports, national drama centre, opera, city of design...), at the gateway to nature (Pilat massif, Loire gorges...) but with quick access to major cities (less than an hour from Lyon and three hours from Paris by TGV).
The Henri Fayol Institute, one of the school's 5 training and research centers, brings together professors in industrial engineering, applied mathematics, computer science, environment and management around the theme of overall business performance. The institute is strongly involved in the flagship projects of the Industry of the Future and the City of the Future.
About the EU ACCORD project
The ACCORD project is a three-years EU Project funded by call HORIZON-CL4-2021-TWIN-TRANSITION-01-10: Digital permits and compliance checks for buildings and infrastructure (IA). It starts in September 2022 and involves 21 partners from 11 countries. It is coordinated by VTT, Finland
ACCORD's objective is to digitalise permitting and compliance processes using BIM and other data sources to improve the productivity and quality of design and construction processes, support the design of climate-neutral buildings and advance a sustainable built environment in line with the EU Green Deal and new European Bauhaus initiative. These digitized processes must be human-centred, transparent and cost-effective for the permit applicants and authorities. Another objective is to develop and integrate technical solutions for automating compliance checking of buildings in their design, construction and renovation/demolition lifecycle phases. All this will be based on open and neutral data exchange standards. ACCORD will develop a semantic framework for European digital building permitting processes, regulations, data and tools. This framework will drive rule formalization and integration of existing compliance tools as microservices. Solutions and tools are to be developed, providing consistency, interoperability and reliability with national regulatory frameworks, processes and standards. The solutions are implemented and demonstrated across construction projects in various EU regulatory contexts: UK, Finland, Estonia, Germany and Spain. ACCORD supports work programme KSOs, expected outcomes and impacts by 1) developing open APIs allowing local authorities to choose their digital services without a lock-in, 2) automating the checking of environmental regulations (CO2 emissions, LCA and circular economy) by developing machine-readable rules, thus steering the digital and green transition, and involving relevant stakeholders through co-creation, and 3) creating information guidelines for structured data models to increase the value of buildings and reduce their operating costs and 4) providing the open ACCORD framework based on microservices allowing businesses to connect and develop solutions resulting in a scalable, durable and flexible permitting ecosystem.
The goals of the project are:
- Specify and develop a semantic framework for European Digital Building Permitting processes, regulations, rules, data and tools
- Formalise, using semantics, permitting and compliance process that incorporates data, software tools and stakeholders.
- Integrate existing state-of-the-art tools and solutions in this area and develop new ones that are able to handle a wide variety of data described according to different specifications and standards (IFC, bSDD, BCF) and rule languages (such as RASE, SWRL, N3-logic and SHACL)
- By utilising the semantic framework, demonstrate the automated permitting and compliance processes for construction, renovation and demolition work, taking place in a set of demonstration projects in various EU regulatory contexts: Finland, Estonia, Germany, UK and Spain.
- Foster wide impact and replication potential of semantic-enabled digital building permitting and com-pliance checking solutions at the European and international levels through a combination of targeted dissemination, focused business exploitation pathways, and participation in relevant international community efforts, such as Build-ingSMART and W3C Linked Building Data Community Group
Objectives of the fellowship
You will mainly contribute to the Work Package 2: Semantisation of regulation and open format for machine-readable rules. More specifically:
- You will lead the task 2.1 on Technical Review of Existing Standards: Review of existing ontologies, standards and data models in the domain and how they can be reused for the purpose of the automatic compliance check. Includes analysis of potential alignments between existing ontologies/data models and of representation gaps that other tasks will identify.
- You will contribute to subsequent tasks on the development of the Building Compliance Ontology, machine-executable regulations, and design of rule formalisation tools.
- You will interact with the other work packages and tasks
Besides the work in the ACCORD project, you will interact with the different members of the Computer Science and Intelligent Systems department at MINES Saint-Étienne:
- Contribute to the organisation of scientific seminars for PhD students and interns
- If interested, contribute to some courses in the a few teaching tasks in the international MSc track on Cyber-Physical and Social Systems.
How to apply
The candidate shall own a PhD in Computer Science, and have excellent knowledge in Semantic Web.
Interviews may be conducted shortly after the reception of the application, with the objective to fill the position September 1st 2022.
To apply, please send your CV, cover letter, and any other useful information, to: Maxime Lefrançois <maxime.lefrancois@emse.fr>; Antoine Zimmermann <antoine.zimmermann@emse.fr>.
Useful links
MINES Saint-Étienne: https://www.mines-stetienne.fr/en/
FAYOL Institute: https://www.mines-stetienne.fr/en/research/centres-and-departments/henri-fayol-institute/