Centre for Transport Studies 
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering  
Imperial College London

2 Posts Research Post in Pervasive Mobile Environmental Sensor Grids

Research Associate and PhD Research Studentship 

Traffic makes a significant contribution to air pollution in inner cities. 
Governments devise policies and traffic management schemes to minimise the 
impact of air pollution. More detailed knowledge of how traffic-generated 
pollution behaves in the urban environment could greatly enhance these policies 
and schemes. Factors such as street and building design, vehicle braking and 
accelerating patterns, individual traveller decisions and local weather 
conditions affect the concentration of pollutants that individuals are exposed 
to as they move around. The PMESG project is jointly funded by the EPSRC and 
the Department for Transport. It will develop e-Science and grid technologies 
to enable data from a network of mobile sensors to be gathered and 
interpreted. The e-Science technologies developed will be generic enough for 
use in other applications of mobile sensor networks, for example, climate or 
weather mapping. The PMESG project is led by Imperial College London, and 
comprises a consortium of partners drawn from the Universities of Cambridge, 
Southampton, Newcastle and Leeds who will work closely with one another and 
with a number of major industrial partners and transport authorities.  

Further details about the PMESG project can be found at www.pmesg.org.uk    

Two posts are available:

1.	Research Associate

This post will be based in the Centre for Transport Studies (CTS) at Imperial 
College London and will have responsibility for the development of traffic and 
air quality modelling tools to support one of the major PMESG applications in 
London. This application will involve the deployment of a range of types of 
wireless-based air pollution sensors on buses and other vehicle fleets in London 
and the use of the data collected in this way to provide dynamic estimates of 
air quality and to improve the treatment of air quality management in urban 
traffic management and control systems. The successful applicant will work 
closely with other PMESG researchers based in CTS and elsewhere at Imperial 
(in the Departments of Computing, Electrical and Electronic Engineering and 
Physics) and with the research teams in the other PMESG institutions. There 
will also be close collaboration with a number of industrial partners, including 
Transport for London.  

Applicants should be qualified to doctoral level in a relevant aspect of 
transport network and/or environmental modelling and be familiar with modern 
statistical computing techniques. Some familiarity with e-Science technology 
would be desirable but is not essential.  

The appointment will be for 36 months, with the possibility of extension. 
Salary will be in the range £22,870-£29,890 per annum.  

2. 	PhD Research Studentship

This research will develop a complementary positioning capability to satellite-
based positioning systems by exploiting the communications signals in the IEEE 
wireless local-area networks (WLANs), to enable the spatio-temporal 
referencing of the data to be captured by the mobile sensors. The wireless 
positioning capability shall be demonstrated during the deployment of a range 
of wireless-based air pollution sensors on buses and other vehicle fleets in 
London. The successful applicant will work closely with other PMESG 
researchers based in CTS and elsewhere at Imperial (in the Departments of 
Computing, Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Physics) and with the 
research teams in the other PMESG institutions. There will also be close 
collaboration with a number of industrial partners, including Transport for 
London.  

The studentship comprises a bursary for three years, initially at £14,300 per 
year, together with College fees at the home/EU rate.  

Applicants should expect to obtain or already have at least an Upper Second 
Class Degree in any branch of Engineering or Physics.  

To apply, please email an application form 
(http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/employment/applicationformacademic), with an 
updated CV and the names of two referees to:   

Professor John Polak 
Centre for Transport Studies 
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering 
Imperial College London 
London 
SW7 2AZ   

E-mail:[log in to unmask] 
Fax: +44(0)20-7594-6102 
W: www.imperial.ac.uk/cts    

Potential applicants wishing to discuss either of these positions informally are 
encouraged to contact Professor Polak directly.  

Closing date: 22 July 2006  

--
Prof. John Polak
Centre for Transport Studies
Imperial College London
http://www.imperial.ac.uk/transport-studies