The Bartlett School of Construction & Project Management
University College London Faculty of the Built Environment The Bartlett School of Construction & Project Management
ABOUT UCL
UCL is one of the world's top universities. Based in the heart of London, it is a dynamic, outward-looking institution. At its establishment in 1826, UCL was radical and responsive to the needs of society, opening up education to all on equal terms, and this ethos – that excellence should go hand-in-hand with enriching society – continues today.
UCL's excellence extends across all academic disciplines; from one of Europe's largest and most productive hubs for biomedical science interacting with several leading London hospitals, to world-renowned centres for architecture (UCL Bartlett) and fine art (UCL Slade School).
The UCL community
UCL's staff and former students have included 29 Nobel prize-winners. It is a truly international community: more than one-third of our student body – around 38,000 strong – come from 150 countries and nearly one- third of UCL’s 13,000 staff are from outside the UK.
UCL offers postgraduate research opportunities in all of its subjects, and provides about 200 undergraduate programmes and more than 400 taught postgraduate programmes. Approximately 52% of the student community is engaged in graduate studies, with nearly a third of these graduate students pursuing research degrees.
Research and teaching at UCL
UCL is independently ranked as the most productive research university in Europe (SIR). It has 983 professors – the second highest number of any university in the UK – and the best academic to student ratio of any UK university, enabling small class sizes and outstanding individual support.
UCL is the top-rated university in the UK for research strength (Research Excellence Framework 2014), by a measure of average research score multiplied by staff numbers submitted. It was rated top not only in the overall results, but in each of the assessed components: publications and other research outputs; research environment; and research impact.
Location and working environment
Based in Bloomsbury, UCL is a welcoming, inclusive university situated at the heart of one of the world's greatest cities. UCL's central campus is spread across approximately three square kilometres of central London and is within easy reach of Euston, St Pancras, King's Cross and Marylebone mainline stations, the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras and the following Underground stations – Euston Square, Warren Street, Goodge Street and Russell Square. Road connections to the M1 and M40 motorways give easy access.
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ABOUT THE BARTLETT
The UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment is the UK’s leading multidisciplinary faculty of the built environment, covering architecture, construction and project management, planning and environmental design as well as other specialist fields. It is one of the world’s largest and most successful centres of built environment research and teaching, with the most world-leading research in its field in the UK, according to the Government’s Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014).
The Bartlett is unique in offering a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of the built environment. With the ability to combine the disciplines such as architecture, construction and project management, environmental design and planning, the Bartlett at the forefront of the debate that is shaping the future of our cities.
The Faculty has just over 2,300 students, divided between 1650 graduates and 650 undergraduates, and 480 staff. The Bartlett’s staff and students represent many nationalities, and the atmosphere is lively and cosmopolitan. Many of the staff are or have been involved in practice or consultancy, thereby establishing a clear link between theory and practice, and its location in the heart of London means the Bartlett is able to draw on the capital’s numerous experts and facilities in the field of the built environment.
The Bartlett is housed in buildings in and around UCL’s central campus in Bloomsbury, with new laboratories and executive education facilities based at UCL East, on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. There are studios, workshops, computing and environmental laboratories, and an extensive library, with about 35,000 books and 375 periodical subscriptions on architecture, construction, building science and planning.
Further information about the Faculty can be found here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/
ABOUT THE BARTLETT SCHOOL OF CONSTRUCTION AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT
The Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management is one of the world’s leading academic centres of excellence in the management of projects and construction economics. Its mission is to have successful students, outstanding outputs and grateful clients, by: delivering research-informed teaching on leading theories and practice performing research which is useful to practitioners and is valued by scholars advising on issues and deliver solutions to government and industry which improve performance
In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, the School was the highest in its discipline in terms of numbers of staff with top output ratings. This indicates that staff in Construction and Project Management had more world-leading (4*) or internationally excellent (3*) outputs than any other institution in its field in terms of research originality, significance and rigour.
The School has around 500 students and in more than 50 staff members. Staff have strong international links with other leading global universities, and strategic relationships with relevant parts of government, key organisations in specific fields and major companies, in and beyond construction.
Undergraduate and postgraduate programmes are consistently informed by research, and cover all areas of project management and construction management, with a particular focus on economics and finance, infrastructure, and more recently, a strong and growing research and teaching strand on digital innovation. Several students have won international awards for work done as part of their programmes, not least the prestigious Bouygues Defi award and the CIOB International undergraduate dissertation competition.
More information about the School can be found here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/construction/
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ABOUT THE POST
Research Fellow in Web-based Collaboration in Construction
We are looking to appoint a full-time researcher to work on a new project funded by Innovate UK under the competition titled: “Increase productivity, performance and quality in UK construction”. The project is titled: “AEC Delta Mobility”. This is a 18-month appointment, and we would expect the post holder to be available to start on 01 February 2018.
The aim of this project is to engage manufacturing in the earliest possible stages of design by streamlining data workflow from consultants to factory. This is currently difficult due to proprietary file formats and commercial vendor lock-in causing significant overheads especially in design for manufacturing. Although open standards such as IFC, COINS and BCF paved the way for collaboration, they are neither suitable for manufacturing nor scalable to large architectural and infrastructure projects. To address such shortcomings, the project investigates a novel open source micro-services web framework to enable the industry exchange individual object-level changes across various applications regardless of the underlying data format. Instead of exporting a whole file, the aim is to stream individual design changes (a.k.a. deltas) to whichever application is conformant with the newly proposed "AEC Delta Mobility" specification.
This is a ground-breaking collaborative project in construction utilising the paradigm of and open innovation by leveraging an ecosystem among the most famous and internationally renowned architectural and engineering practices: BuroHappold (project lead), 3D Repo, Rhomberg Sersa Rail Group, HOK, Atkins (SNC-Lavalin) and Arup, organised in a consortium. Open specifications and an open source reference implementation will be delivered to streamline the design processes for manufacturing, reduce delays and thus directly increase productivity on a wide variety of multidisciplinary projects.
The project has the following objectives: 1. To define a new common interchange schema that is open and shared across various systems; 2. To specify a new technology so that different architecture, engineering and construction applications can communicate easily over the Internet; 3. To validate the proposed specification by creating a working reference implementation that connects open-source Speckle Works (https://speckle.works/) and 3D Repo with proprietary systems. The project is organised into eight Work Packages: WP1: Project management (months 1-18); WP2: Requirements gathering (months 1-3); WP3: Delta container specification (months 4-9); WP4: REST API specification (months 7-12); WP5: Server Architecture (months 10-16); WP6: Experimental evaluation (months 10-16); WP7: Project Evaluation (months 16-18); WP8: Dissemination (months 1-18). The post holder will be based principally in the School of Construction and Project Management, where Dr Eleni Papadonikolaki is based, as well as Dimitrie Stefanescu, initiator of the open-source Speckle Works, platform and Co-Investigator of the project. Travel will be required to various locations of the six consortium partners for meetings and collocation for pair-working as requested. Travel will be also requested twice over the project duration for conferences.
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JOB DESCRIPTION
Title: Research Fellow in Web-based Collaboration in Construction Duration: 1 February 2019 – 31 July 2020 (18 months) Grade: Grade 7 £35,328-42,701 (inclusive of London Allowance) per annum. Appointments are usually made at the bottom of the scale, but can be placed higher for exceptional candidates. Department: The Bartlett School of Construction & Project Management Location: 1-19 Torrington Place, UCL Bloomsbury Campus, London
Responsible to: Dr Eleni Papadonikolaki (Principal Investigator)
Main purpose of the job To carry out research and development in web-based design collaboration, contributing substantially to the “AEC Delta Mobility” project, funded by Innovate UK, and in collaboration with the rest six project partners: BuroHappold (project lead), 3D Repo, Rhomberg Sersa Rail Group, HOK, Atkins (SNC-Lavalin) and Arup.
Duties and responsibilities
Research To research and develop requirements for web-based design collaboration; To prototype software applications and server infrastructure; To prepare data, API and server architecture specifications for the “AEC Delta Mobility” project; To prepare written reports and present research findings and development to project partners for project review purposes; To produce high quality publications, or other research outputs; To evaluation and demonstrate desired process improvements through developed prototypes; To participate in knowledge exchange activities with the Innovate UK “AEC Delta Mobility” project consortium, its community of researchers, developers and other external stakeholders; To communicate research outcomes nationally and internationally in conferences.
Administration To organise project meetings, industry workshops and engagement events; To participate in departmental and faculty seminars aimed at sharing research outcomes and building interdisciplinary collaboration within and outside the School; To maintain research records, including on project budget, ethics, data management.
Related activities To engage in training and continuing professional development; To potentially undertake a modest amount of teaching (as requested by the department). This is not a requirement of the post but many research associates find this activity helpful in developing their CV. To actively follow and promote UCL policies, including equal opportunities; To maintain an awareness and observation of fire and health and safety regulations; To carry out these and any other duties commensurate with the grade and purpose of the post, in line with objectives agreed in the staff review process.
Points to note This job description reflects the present requirements of the post. It may be reviewed from time to time by the Director of School or his/her nominated delegate. As duties and responsibilities change or develop, the job description will be reviewed and be subject to amendment in consultation with the post holder.
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PERSON SPECIFICATION
Applications will be reviewed against the essential and desirable criteria listed below. Applicants should include a full academic and research CV with their application form. Applicants are advised to explicitly state and evidence how they meet each of the criteria in their application. This can be done either by showing previous projects that employ the technologies mentioned below, contributions to other open source projects, or in any other relevant manner. Optionally, applicants may include a link to their GitHub profile.
Criteria Essential or Desirable Experience and knowledge Evidence of conducting original research, reflected in a publication record in leading Essential outlets (journals or conferences) Background in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Databases, Virtual Essential Environments or other related Engineering areas Knowledge of leading edge research, development and theory in the subject area Essential Experience of working in a research or consultancy environment Essential Experience of multi-disciplinary working, ideally in software development Desirable Experience of working in the built environment Desirable Evidence of collaborations, enterprise, or knowledge exchange with practitioners Desirable and/or policy-makers Skills Ability to conduct research and work independently (including literature review, data Essential collection and analysis) Excellent programming skills (backend development and specification) Essential Familiarity with at least one of the following technological stacks, and/or backend Essential web development in general: NodeJS, .NET, MongoDB/Postgresql Experience with implementing and documenting RESTful APIs. Familiarity with Essential OpenAPI (swagger) is a plus. Ability to write, edit and deliver written work suitable for academic journals and Essential industry publications Excellent communication and interpersonal skills that support engagement with Essential academic and professional services staff and external stakeholders Excellent work organisational and time management skills Essential Ability to present complex information effectively to a range of audiences Desirable Qualifications Bachelor’s degree in an engineering discipline Essential PhD (or near completion) or equivalent in a relevant field Essential Postgraduate degree in a related field (e.g. computer science, engineering, built Desirable environment) Other Commitment to UCL’s Equal Opportunity Policy Statement Essential
To apply for the vacancy please click on the ‘Apply Now’ button on the HR website.
For academic queries about the post, please contact Dr Eleni Papadonikolaki on +44(0)20 3108 3219, email: [email protected]
For queries about the application process, please contact Helen Pascoe, School Manager on +44(0)20 3108 3215 email [email protected]
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