Open position - Demonstrator of search engine for compressed camera fingerprints
This announcement regards an open position for a software developer to work on a cutting-edge technology project in the field of camera identification. In particular, the activity is in the context of the ERC Proof of Concept grant "ToothPic - A large-scale camera identification system based on compressed fingerprints", which has been recently funded by the European Union under the prestigious ERC funding framework.
ToothPic will implement a prototype large-scale camera search engine that given one or more photos acquired by a given camera returns a list of webpages containing pictures acquired by the same device. This is similar in spirit to Google Images or TinEye but with a new search paradigm based on the device. This is the first time anyone attempted to build such application thanks to breakthroughs made by Politecnico di Torino in compression of camera sensor fingerprints to enable operations on large scales.
The ongoing research activity on this project has already led to two filed patents, and it is foreseen that a start-up company will be launched in the first half of 2016 in order to commercialize products based on this technology. To learn more, please check out our recent papers on the compressed fingerprint format and large-scale search algorithms, as well as this piece in the local news.
The available position is for a one-year contract to a full-stack developer who will be involved in the following activities, working together a more experienced software developer:
- Backend development will require functions to extract and compress camera fingerprints, as well as high-thoughput matching against a database. MapReduce-like computational paradigms against distributed databases will be used to maximize throughput. Familiarity with distributed DBs such as Aerospike or Apache Cassandra is a plus. The system will be implemented on 2+ high-performance servers with bleeding-edge I/O based on PCIe SSD cards and lots of RAM.
- Frontend development will require a minimum working website allowing a user to register his camera and interface with the search backend
- Additionally a minimum working Android app to implement a two-step authenticator based on compressed fingerprints will be developed. This app should shoot a photo, compute a compressed fingerprint and send it to a server.
Requirements: Experience in C/C++/Java programming. Knowledge of databases is a plus. The position is open to young graduates and PhDs.
Start of activity: end of 2015 / beginning of 2016.
Contract type: For this position, the contract type is "assegno di ricerca". Salary will be modulated based on experience.
How to apply: To apply or ask for more information, send a detailed CV to enrico dot magli atdomain polito.it