PhD student position in Computer Vision

The Department of Ancient Civilizations of the University of Basel invites applications for one PhD student position (100%) in Computer Vision for 3 years on the topic of offline to online conversion of historical handwritings within the SNSF-funded research project 'Egrapsa: Retracing the evolutions of handwritings in Greco-Roman Egypt thanks to digital palaeography'.

Deadline for application: May 15, 2024.
Beginning of the position: September 01, 2024 (ideally).
Work place: Basel (Switzerland)
Salary: approx. 50'000 Swiss francs per year
The interviews are expected to take place beginning of May online via Zoom.

The project

Papyri preserved by the dry climate of Egypt are an unparalleled source of information about the Ancient World. However, their large number, diversity and current dispersion have impeded a comprehensive grasp of their nature and content. In particular, palaeography, the study of handwritings that has the potential to unveil where, when, and by whom a text was written, still relies on experts' assertions that rarely reach consensus. New technological advances in Computer Science, notably in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing now allow building the big picture of the writing culture of Greco-Roman Egypt and developing scientific analyses of scripts. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation for five years, the Starting Grant project EGRAPSA (literally ?I have written" in Ancient Greek) aims at providing a new theoretical framework to the palaeography of Greek papyri. Starting from sound evidence, it aims at retracing the evolutions of handwritings, generating a model that, in turn, can contribute to organizing the papyrological documentation in a coherent panorama, improving the solidity of dates and writer identifications made on palaeographical grounds. The ground-breaking dimension of the project is to encompass the entire papyrological documentation in its full complexity to measure similarities and explain evolutions by focusing on the reconstruction of the dynamics of writing , thus to literally re-trace handwritings. For further information, see the project website .

Your position

The PhD student will be fully funded for a period of three years, be registered as a PhD student at the University of Basel, and work under the co-supervision of Prof. Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello (Department of Ancient Civilizations) and of Prof. Ivan Dokmani? ( Department of Mathematics and Computer Science ) with support from the Center for Data Analytics ( CeDA ). The PhD dissertation project will focus on how to experimentally capture hypothetical ductus (stroke order and direction of writing) reconstructed by experts and to design deep learning pipelines as well as experimental protocols to acquire and compare ductus reconstitutions.
In addition, the PhD student will take part in the team's discussions on the history and evolutions of Greek handwritings across a millennium. She/he will help organize – jointly with the team – a number of workshops and conferences, participate in outreach activities of the project and present her/his research at scientific meetings.

Your profile

Applicants should hold a Master's degree in Computer Vision or related fields with grades above average (Master's thesis must be completed by the start of the position), be highly motivated to conduct innovative transdisciplinary research at the intersections of Artificial Intelligence, Kinematics, Digital Humanities and Ancient History, have an excellent command of at least English, and be able to work autonomously within an internationally and institutionally diverse environment.

We offer you

The project is based in the Department of Ancient Civilizations and conducted in collaboration with the Center for Data Analytics led by Prof. Ivan Dokmani? at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science . The collaborative nature of the project ensures that the successful candidate will be immersed in a stimulating machine learning research environment, with cutting-edge infrastructure for high-performance computing provisioned by sciCORE – the Center for Scientific Computing . The salary and employment conditions will be those of PhD students at the University of Basel.