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. 1 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/ 2 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