Vacancies

The University of Stavanger invites applications for up to three doctorate scholarships in Information Technology at the Faculty of Science and Technology, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, beginning September 1, 2015.

There are 15 projects offered in total, which include two IR projects supervised by me:

#8. Living labs for information retrieval

Living labs is a new evaluation paradigm for information retrieval (IR), where the idea is to perform experiments in situ, with real users doing real tasks using real-world applications. This type of evaluation is standard practice in (large) industrial research labs, but is only now becoming available to academic researchers [1,2]. Despite recent developments, there are still numerous challenges to be overcome, including living labs architecture and design, hosting, maintenance, security, privacy, participant recruiting, and scenarios and tasks for use development. This focus of this project is on developing and employing the living labs evaluation paradigm for IR. The PhD candidate will contribute to the understanding of online evaluation and how to generalize across different use-cases.

[1] http://living-labs.net/
[2] http://www.clef-newsreel.org/

#9. Answering complex queries

Web search engines have become remarkably effective in providing appropriate answers to queries that are issued frequently. However, when it comes to complex information needs, often formulated as natural language questions, responses become much less satisfactory (e.g., “Which European universities have active Nobel laureates?”). Manual effort is often required to collect and synthesize information from multiple sources, a process that may involve a series of filtering, sorting, and aggregation steps. The goal of this project is to investigate how to improve query understanding and answer retrieval for complex queries, using massive volumes of unstructured data in combination with knowledge bases.

Details and application instructions can be found here.
Application deadline: February 24, 2015.

Important: Feel free to contact me directly for more information regarding the projects. However, applications need to be submitted on jobbnorge.no (i.e., don’t send them in email to me). Also, don’t forget to indicate which projects you are applying for, in order of preference.

The University of Stavanger invites applications for a three-year doctorate scholarship in Information Technology, at the Faculty of Science and Technology, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, beginning September 1, 2014.

Project: Semantic Entity Search
Semantic search refers to the idea that the search engine understands the concepts, meaning and intent behind the query that the user enters into the search box, and provides rich and focused responses (as opposed to merely a list of documents). Entities, such as people, organizations or products, play a central role in this context; they reflect the way humans think and organize information. We can observe that major search engines (like Google or Apple’s SIRI) are becoming “smarter” day by day in recognizing specific types of objects (for example, locations, events or celebrities); yet, true semantic search has still a long way to go.
This project aims to develop a theoretically sound and computationally efficient framework for entity-oriented information access: the search and discovery of entities and relationships between entities. A key element to a successful approach is the combination of massive volumes of structured and unstructured information from the Document Web and the Data Web, respectively. Successful candidates will be expected to conduct research, design, develop, and deploy state-of-art, scalable information retrieval, information extraction and machine learning techniques for innovative entity-oriented search applications. The project will include both theoretical and empirical explorations, where lab-based results will be evaluated in ‘live’ environments with real users.

Qualifications: M.Sc. in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Mathematics or related fields by the appointment date. Good written and spoken command of English. Research experience or a track record of project based work, demonstrable interest in the domain, solid programming skills (particularly Java), and experience in manipulating and analyzing large data sets (esp. using Hadoop) are a clear plus.

The research fellow is salaried according to the State Salary Code, l.pl 17.515, code 1017, LR 20, ltr 50, of NOK 421 100,- per annum.

Details and application instructions can be found here.
Application deadline: January 11, 2014.

PhD positions at NTNU
As part of the Microsoft-led centre on Information Access Disruptions (iAD), NTNU is offering up to 4 PhD positions.
The NTNU-led subproject of iAD focuses on activities to create schema agnostic indexing services. There is strong convergence in approach and principles for information access across databases, XML repositories, text search and multimedia access. Still, different design targets are predicted to enable completely different technologies and use patterns for information access.
The research problems of the PhD positions should be within these target areas:

1. Cloud as a platform for next generation information access (Supervisor: Prof. Svein Erik Bratsberg)
2. Content based multimedia retrieval (Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Magnus Lie Hetland)
3. Temporal and spatial information retrieval (Supervisor: Prof. Kjetil Nørvåg)

PhD grants at NTNU are normally 3 years, but may be extended by one additional year.
The PhD fellowships are placed in Norwegian salary code 1017, gross NOK 391.100 per year (equivalent to approx. EUR 51.000 and USD 65.000).
Application deadline: Feb 3, 2012.

Mobility fellowships for PhD students and young researchers
The Yggdrasil mobility programme offers grants to international PhD students and younger researchers (who received their PhD degree after 1 August 2006) for longer (between 3-12 months) research stays in Norway.
The fellowships (13500 NOK per month) essentially cover the cost of accommodation in Norway and the extra cost for food. (Note: Norway is *not* one of the cheapest places to live, so you’re assumed to have some additional income for covering “other aspects of life”.)
Application deadline: Feb 15, 2012.