Job Detail

The Microsoft Mixed Reality & AI lab in Zurich, Switzerland, is a research and development team building the future of mixed reality. We are passionate about using computer vision to map and understand the environment, recognize and track relevant objects, and assist the user in performing the task at hand. The team is building up diverse expertise across computer vision, graphics, machine learning, robotics, interaction, and software engineering. The same spatial understanding that is important for human users of mixed reality is also important for robots. We want humans and robots to work together in the same space as collaborators.

Mixed reality enables a person to see the robot’s view of the world and facilitates more natural interaction with robots. In turn, autonomous agents can contribute to building maps and collecting data to increase environment understanding in the cloud. We are looking for a researcher with background in vision-based localization and mapping and experience in the robotics domain. You should have generalist knowledge of the components that make up robotic systems, and want to work both on long-horizon prototypes and demonstrations as well as writing product code. 

 
The new Microsoft lab in Zurich is located near ETH Zurich, the top technical school in continental Europe, enabling close collaboration in multiple areas. The city of Zurich, Switzerland, is centrally located in Europe and consistently ranks among the top cities in the world for quality of life.

Responsibilities

• Develop advanced solutions for geometric computer vision problems (i.e.., structure-from-motion, visual-inertial localization, SLAM, multi-view stereo, etc.)


• Create demonstrations on physical robot platforms showcasing the lab’s work on mapping, localization, and interaction using mixed reality


• Contribute to development of perception algorithms for both Mixed Reality and robot applications


• Investigate challenging unsolved problems and design novel solutions by rapidly prototyping and evaluating the ideas using data/test driven analysis. Develop the prototypes into real products using strong software engineering skills. 


• Leverage the close collaboration with ETH Zurich and other excellent academic partners for exploratory research with the opportunity to publish at top conferences or journals. 

Qualifications

• Excellent oral and written communication skills 


• Should hold a PhD in computer vision or robotics. Ideally, the candidate has a strong publication record with research results published at top-tier conferences and journals (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ICRA, IROS, RSS , etc.) 


• Must be a strong programmer with software engineering experience and good debugging skills. Experience in the following would be advantageous: 
  
  
  
  • C++ (esp. C++11 and newer), C, Python
  
  
  • High- and low-level code optimization 
  
  


• Should have hands-on experience working on at least one of: 
  
  
  
  • 3D computer vision 
  
  
  • Place recognition
  
  
  • Vision-based localization and mapping
  
  
  • Probability and statistics 
  
  
  • Numerical algorithms, e.g., non-linear optimization 
  
  
  • Perception for mobile robotics
  
  
  • Novel sensing hardware 
  
  


• Should have strong mathematical skills 

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

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