The Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences is the national centre for research into the geosphere. With around 1,650 employees, we develop a sound understanding of systems and processes of the solid Earth as well as strategies and options for action to counter global change, understand natural hazards and sustainably secure energy and raw material requirements.

Recently smartphone applications have been developed to detect the occurrence of earthquakes and provide an early warning (Earthquake Network (EQN) application, Finazzi, 2016) or to allow smartphone users to react after an earthquake and assess the level of vibrations felt (LastQuake application, Bossu et al., 2018). A collaboration between GFZ (Prof. Fabrice Cotton), the University of Bergamo (Prof. Francesco Finazzi) and EMSC (Euro Mediterranean Seismological Center) has been developed to analyse the datasets resulting from these applications. This collaboration has shown that LastQuake data can be used to assess the impact of earthquakes (Lillienkamp et al., 2022) and has confirmed the potential of using EQN detections for early warning (Finazzi et al., 2024).

The aim of this work is to explore these new data from smartphones and to develop new methods for merging different seismic vibration measurements. The goal of these developments will be to improve early warning methods from smartphones and to produce high-resolution vibration maps after an earthquake using machine learning techniques (e.g., Esfahani et al., 2023; Lilienkamp et al., 2023).

Your responsibilities:

• Develop a working database of smartphone earthquake reports and records
• Use existing ground motion amplification models developed by the team to select parameters (e.g., geology, slope, building environment) that may affect ground motion at the smartphone location
• Develop methods to detect outliers and improve the quality of the database
• Explore the potential of these new observations to predict ground shaking and map site amplifications in urban areas
• Explore the potential of these new observations to complement classical seismological data
• Suggest improvements to the smartphone applications and contribute to a new generation of smartphone seismological applications

Your qualifications:

• Master degree or diploma in Physics, Computer science, Mathematics or Geosciences is mandatory
• Knowledge of geophysics and seismology
• Knowledge in statistics and/or Machine learning
• Solid Programming skills
• Good English language skills

Please use for the application templates on: www.initiate-dn.eu/projects.html

• Cover letter on research interests plus motivation
• Mobility declaration including documentation
• Names and contact information of two referees
• CV
• Transcripts and diplomas on master degree. If not available, a confirmation from your institution on completed degree by the application deadline
• Approved documentation of proficiency in English
• Scientific publication list (if applicable)