Victor Maus

The University of Eastern Finland is recruiting three doctoral researchers for the School of Computing on the Kuopio campus to join the ERC-funded MINE-THE-GAP project. The project combines satellite imagery, mining data reports, and AI to study mining activities and their impacts worldwide, with a focus on improving transparency and sustainability in mining. Each doctoral researcher will lead an individual thesis within one of three research themes: mapping mining land use through semantic segmentation of satellite images; estimating mining waste by predicting terrain height changes from radar and optical image time series; or identifying minerals and commodities using multispectral and hyperspectral image classification. The work centers on building, training, and validating scalable deep learning and computer vision models using large, multi-modal Earth observation and spatial datasets. The positions sit within a research group with strong international visibility and close ties to collaborators abroad. The team environment is described as supportive, with close supervision and mentoring, and the project offers opportunities for international collaboration and research visits. Partners mentioned include the German Aerospace Center (DLR), GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, Monash University Indonesia, and the University of Melbourne. The successful candidates will work closely with the principal investigator, Victor Maus, as well as postdoctoral researchers and international collaborators, contributing to journal publications, conference presentations, and open science.