CfACTs Research Fellow (2 year Fixed-Term)

Postdoctoral Researcher – Learned Resolution, Independent Rendering for Feature Films

Salary £50,317.00 per annum (pro rata)

The Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University is one of the largest of its kind in the world and has a global reputation for combining research excellence and teaching practice.  The research fellow will join the Faculty’s Centre for Applied Creative Technologies (CfACTs), a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) COFUND research training centre that provides international mobility and cross-sectoral experience through a well-aligned research and training programme. The academic expertise underpinning CfACTs is sourced from BU’s world-class National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA). 

The research fellow will be an employee of BU and embark on a two-year programme of world leading research with industrial partner Framestore, in the area of: Learned Resolution, Independent Rendering for Feature Films.   Visual media content is being produced and consumed at ever increasing resolutions. These improvements afford dramatic levels of fidelity and detail to the viewer, but their generation often incurs significant computational cost. Working within the production pipeline, using the in-house renderer Freak, the researcher will prototype machine learning based methodologies to decouple sampling rate from final image resolution, and generate high quality, super resolution production content, within a significantly reduced computational footprint. To ensure applicability to the production environment, importance is placed on maintaining temporal coherency and a robust handling of a wide range of visual phenomena, such as hair, geometric details, motion blur and volumetric media.

This work has the potential to extend the domain of knowledge, generate robust production quality renders at super resolutions and significantly improve the efficiency of rendered image generation.

Please see the BU‑CfACTs webpage for guidance for applicants: www.bournemouth.ac.uk/cfacts-research

The CfACTs fellowships follow the specification and requirement of the Standard fellowships of the MSCA; available in full from:

https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/other/guides_for_applicants/h2020-guide-appl-msca-if-2018-20_en.pdf

To be eligible to apply an applicant must meet the requirements outlined and:

• Be in possession of a doctorate or have at least four years full-time equivalent research experience.
• Not have resided or carried out his/her main activity (work, studies, etc.) in the United Kingdom for more than 12 months in the three years immediately before the call deadline.

An applicant will provide a research proposal to outline their research project and an academic CV.

As a part of the application all applicants are required to submit the following:

• BU Application Form and the Equality Monitoring form
• Research Proposal (max.10 pages)
• CV (max.5 pages)
• Ethics issues - Applicants must provide information on how they intend to address potential ethics issues, as required by the Horizon 2020 Guidance on Ethics Self-Assessment;
• Signed support letters from the applicants PhD academic supervisors; (optional)
• Criminal Record Declaration Form

This position is available on a 2 year fixed-term basis.  For additional information please contact the BU Academic Supervisor Dr Xiaosong Yang or Prof Jian Chang, CfACTs Project Coordinator, via  CfACTs-enquiries@bournemouth.ac.uk quoting FMC303 in the subject line.

A detailed job description and person specification are available from the https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/about/jobs/cfacts-research-fellow-fixed-term-multiple-positions-available  together with a link to the CfACTs application forms.

Closing date: (23:30hrs GMT) 30 April 2023

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