Chinese scholar wins Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowships for pioneering research collaboration with the BISITE research group at USAL.
The Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship (MSC-IF) is meant to support the best, most promising individual researchers across all disciplines and is highly regarded among the scientific community throughout the world. Under the MSC-IF support (Grant Agreement no. 709267), Dr. Tiancheng Li will carry out his project “SmartPosition” under the supervision of Prof. Juan M. Corchado within the BISITE research group at USAL from May 2016 to November 2017. During this time Dr. Li will spend a three-month secondment period in Vienna, Austria with the Institute of Telecommunications, Vienna University of Technology (VUT) where Prof. Franz Hlawatsch will serve as the secondment director and an important collaborator of this project.
Dr. Tiancheng Li arrived in Salamanca from Xi’an China on 2nd May 2016, after a leave last December. Before applying for the fellowship in September 2015, Dr. Li worked as a postdoctoral researcher within the BISITE research group for one year under the supervision of Prof. Corchado. Prior to that, he received a PhD from London South Bank University in 2013 and a second PHD from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China in 2015.
This “SmartPosition” project aims to develop two new estimation paradigms for designing a reliable, high precision and real-time mobile positioning system (MPS): clustering for filtering (C4F) and fitting for smoothing (F4S). The present MPS faces two immediate challenges from the real life world. First, little is known about the background and therefore accurate system modelling is difficult or even impossible. Secondly, the sensor data can be very rich, which can pose a great challenge for the implementation of real time filtering.
This project will develop “Big Sensor”, a new concept that aims to flexibly utilize the rich time-varying sensor data in the concerned MPS and to implement C4F and F4S in real time. The Big Sensor-based C4F and F4S use all available information including WIFI, Bluetooth, GPS signals as well as altitude, acceleration, and direction information based on embedded software to locate mobile devices. The research emphasis of the project will focus on flexible and optimal sensor data inference, which is found by developing novel clustering and fitting algorithms and approaches. The resulting MPS and its apps will be integrated into a Home Care System, for which the Host group has conducted prior research, to track the movement and well-being of elderly/disabled people.
The “SmartPosition” project has received a high score on the Excellence part, 4.8/5.0, including highly recognized comments on the research fellow, Dr. Tiancheng Li: The proposal convincingly demonstrates the capacity of the researcher, with two grades and 2 PhD from 2013 and 2015, and still he has an excellent record of publications and ability to work on research topics and obtain quality outcomes. The career development plan established with the host supervisor would lead the researcher to a high professional maturity level.
