Are you an ambitious researcher looking for your next challenge? Do you have a background in computer simulation, statistics, and data analytics? Do you want to further your career in one of the UK’s leading research intensive Universities?

You will work on a new project, funded by the European Research Council, called Data Assimilation for Agent-Based Models (DUST)(https://dust.leeds.ac.uk/). The utilmate aim of the project is to develop a comprehensive simulation that can be used to model the current state of an urban area and provide valuable information to policy makers. Agent-based modelling is an ideal methodology for this type of simulation but one that suffers from a serious drawback: models are not able to incorporate up-to-date data to reduce uncertainty. There is a wealth of new data being generated in ‘smart’ cities that could inform a model of urban dynamics (e.g. from social media contributions, mobile telephone use, public transport records, vehicle traffic counters, etc.) but we lack the tools to incorporate these streams of data into agent-based models. Instead, models are typically initialised with historical data and therefore their estimates of the current state of a system diverge rapidly from reality.
The research team is lead by Dr Nicolas Malleson (N.S.Malleson@leeds.ac.uk) and will be located within the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA), which has been established with more than £20 million of funding from the University and four major research councils. The city of Leeds is already recognised as a hub for big data analytics in business, health care and academic research. In addition, the University has also recently become a partner in the Alan Turing Institute, which is the UK’s national institute for data science, and this new collaboration offers exciting opportunites to for LIDA researchers to engage with scientific leaders from a range of fields.