The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway, is seeking candidates for the following position(s):

Information Mining internship

The Unit for Natural Language Processing at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI: http://www.deri.ie/) of the National University of Ireland, Galway invites applications for an internship in information mining. The successful applicant will have the following responsibilities:

Research: topic clustering. We are currently extracting over 27,000 topics from scientific publications using NLP techniques, and need a reliable and efficient technique to cluster these so that they are more manageable in our expert-finding application's user interface. This could be hierarchical topic clustering (super topics and sub topics in a tree structure) or some other suitable way determined by research.

Development: crawling. We are currently identifying further sources of both documents and metadata describing the documents, and need infrastructure to be setup and run to effectively crawl this information for subsequent information extraction. This will involve the setting up and administration of databases, metadata stores and open source crawling tools, as well as the development of some custom screen-scraping tools.

Any other tasks required of them. The work will be carried out in the context of an ongoing industrial research collaboration, and internally with DERI's Unit for Information Mining and Retrieval. Internships are aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students, with a duration of 3-12 months and will be remunerated at EUR 1000 per month (EUR 1200 for postgraduate students).

DERI is a leading research institute in semantic technologies that offers a stimulating, dynamic and multi-cultural research environment, excellent ties to research-groups worldwide, close collaboration with industrial partners and up-to-date infrastructure and resources. The DERI Unit for Natural Language Processing (http://nlp.deri.ie/) has a focus on applied research in ontology-based information extraction, semantic-level text mining and the use of linguistic and semantic methods in information retrieval. The unit develops methods for the efficient application of NLP tools in combination with domain semantics as specified in ontologies, thesauri and other knowledge organisation systems for relevant use cases. Research is carried out in close cooperation with the DERI Unit for Information Mining and Retrieval (http://uimr.deri.ie/) in the context of the DERI Semantic Information Mining stream (http://sim.deri.ie/) as well as with other DERI units.

Please send an expression of interest, preferably with links to relevant previous study and/or research experience, by August 1st to: Dr. Fergal Monaghan fergal.monaghan@deri.org

Funded Ph.D. Position in Modeling Linked Sensor Data and incorporating Social Feedback and Community Sharing

Digital Enterprise Research Institute, NUI Galway

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland Galway is seeking applications for a fully-funded Ph.D. position in Modeling Sensor Data and incorporating Social Feedback and Community Sharing. The successful candidate will join the EU-funded FP7 SPITFIRE project team in DERI at NUI Galway: Semantic-Service Provisioning for the Internet of Things using Future Internet Research by Experimentation.

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Galway (DERI) is one of the largest semantic research organization in the world (http://www.deri.ie/). DERI's mission is to enable networked knowledge, globally interlinking information from the Web and the physical world. DERI is based in Galway is one of the most beautiful Irish cities shaped by artistic communities, active student life, innovative industry and leading edge research. Galway is located at the beautiful west coast of Ireland within the Galway Bay, 'between' Europe and the U.S., making it an ideal hub for national, European and international research.

SPITFIRE is an international project funded by the European Union working towards the realisation of a stronger connection between the natural and the digital worlds. The goal of this project is to investigate unified concepts, methods and software infrastructures that facilitate the efficient development of applications that span and integrate the Internet and the embedded (i.e., sensor) world, and make use of state-of-the-art Web and Semantic Web technologies to achieve this goal. SPITFIRE will drastically lower the effort required for developing robust, interoperable and scalable applications in the Internet of Things. This will facilitate new kinds of applications and services that are not possible to date and thus have an impact on research, industry and private households. The project consortium consists of academic and industrial partners from Ireland, Germany, Greece and Belgium. It is coordinated by DERI, NUI Galway.

The successful candidate is expected to work towards (1) the modeling of sensor data as Linked Data, (2) the incorporation of user-feedback for validating sensor description and (3) collaborative methods for sharing sensor description and related queries at Web scale. This will provide new methods and techniques for enabling sensor data description being available on the Web, being able to share these description within communities of interest. Use-cases where such methods could be deployed include Ambient Intelligence and Reality Mining. Ambient Intelligence is focused around personal applications, varying dependent on context, user’s goals, user roles, relations and entities. Reality Mining deals with the investigation and modelling of principles underlying the evolution and interactions in large social, communication and collaborative networks derived from individual sensors and their data.

The work will be achieved in close cooperation with other projects in DERI, as well as with the other partners from the SPITFIRE consortium. The FIRE initiative and its large-scale experimental facilities provide the unique opportunity to evaluate the developed methods and algorithms at large scale and in a realistic environment.

Areas of interest include - but are not limited to:

• Modelling Sensor data as Linked Open Data and using ontology engineering best practices
• Incorporating user-feedback in output of mined sensor description
• Designing social software and community sharing applications for sensor data
• Querying sensor data and sharing queries description in online communities

The successful candidate should have at least a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, science or engineering (M.Sc. is a plus), have the pre-requisites for Ph.D. studies at NUI Galway, and must be fluent in english. The Ph.D. position covers academic fees, a generous monthly stipend and a research travel allowance for a three year period, as well as the use of DERI's facilities for experimentations and research. The Ph.D. position is initially funded for a 3-years duration, with subject to extension to 4-years.

The following criteria are expected from the student:

• Interest with Semantic Web technologies (RDF(S)/OWL, SPARQL, etc.) and Linked Data
• Interest and familiarity with social software (blogs, wikis, microblogging, etc.)
• Interest for standardisation processes
• Good programming skills
• Good english writing skills

The successful candidate will work with the DERI Principle Investigator Prof. Dr. Manfred Hauswirth and Dr. Alexandre Passant in DERI, NUI Galway. There will be extensive opportunities for collaboration with other researchers and with other research groups and projects in DERI and in Europe, as well as in other world-wide institutes with whom DERI collaborates, including opportunities for a long-term visit during the Ph.D. timeframe.

The application must be send by Jun 30th, 2010 to Dr. Alexandre Passant (alexandre.passant@deri.org) in either (X)HTML, pdf or plain text and must contain the following:

• a CV
• a one page statement explaining the candidate's interest in and compatibility with the objectives of the position
• a list of (minimum two) referees
• additionally, publications, software and other artifacts that the student may be consider relevant - ideally as links to resources available online

Applications that do not follow the previous format will not be considered. Requests for information should be addressed to the same person (alexandre.passant@deri.org).

Funded PhD Student Position in Querying and Mining Dynamic Sensor Data

Digital Enterprise Research Institute, NUI Galway

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland Galway is seeking applications for a funded PhD student position in Querying and Mining Dynamic Sensor Data. The successful candidate will join the EU-funded FP7 SPITFIRE project team in DERI at NUI Galway: Semantic-Service Provisioning for the Internet of Things using Future Internet Research by Experimentation

SPITFIRE is an international project funded by the European Union working towards the realisation of a stronger connection between the natural and the digital worlds. The goal of this project is to investigate unified concepts, methods and software infrastructures that facilitate the efficient development of applications that span and integrate the Internet and the embedded (i.e., sensor) world, and make use of state-of-the-art Web and Semantic Web technologies to achieve this goal. SPITFIRE will drastically lower the effort required for developing robust, interoperable and scalable applications in the Internet of Things. This will facilitate new kinds of applications and services that are not possible to date and thus have an impact on research, industry and private households. The project consortium consists of academic and industrial partners from Ireland, Germany, Greece and Belgium. It is coordinated by DERI, NUI Galway.

DERI Galway is one of the largest semantic research organisations in the world. DERI's mission is to enable networked knowledge, globally interlinking information from the Web and the physical world.

The successful candidate is expected to work towards sensor-based applications in the area of Ambient Intelligence and Reality Mining. Ambient Intelligence is focused around personal applications, varying dependent on context, user’s goals, user roles, relations and entities. Reality Mining deals with the investigation and modelling of principles underlying the evolution and interactions in large social, communication and collaborative networks derived from individual sensors and their data. However, as these are only examples of the newly enabled applications, focus will be on the algorithmic design for achieving large-scale analysis and mining tasks on top of fast-streaming data from physically distributed sensors at Internet scale in real time. This involves querying and mining of sensor data based on semantic descriptions and actual content in a distributed, large-scale and streaming set-up. The work will be achieved in close cooperation with other units and projects in DERI, as well as with the other partners from the SPITFIRE consortium . The FIRE initiative and its large-scale experimental facilities provide the unique opportunity to evaluate the developed methods and algorithms at large scale and in a realistic environment.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• Mining sensor descriptions and content data at large scale and in real time
• Designing scalable, distributed, real-time algorithms to tackle problems in massive streaming data
• Distributed querying and in-network processing of data
• Analysing and modelling the interactions and dynamics of communities and their individual members

The successful candidate should have at least a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, maths, science or engineering, have the pre-requisites for PhD studies at NUI Galway, and must be fluent in English. The PhD studentship covers academic fees, a generous monthly stipend and a research travel allowance for a three year period, as well as the use of DERI's facilities for experimentation and research.

In addition, the following criteria are desirable but not necessary:

• Familiarity with large-scale, distributed, dynamic data analysis (e.g., data streaming algorithms)
• Familiarity with data mining, feature selection and machine learning
• Familiarity with (distributed) query processing and data management
• Familiarity with graph algorithms and theory (e.g., finding connected components efficiently) and social network analysis
• Interest in Semantic Web technologies (RDF(S)/OWL, SPARQL, etc.) and Linked Data
• Masters or equivalent degree in a relevant discipline or topic
• Good programming skills
• Good english writing skills

The successful candidate will work with the DERI Principle Investigator Prof. Manfred Hauswirth and Dr. Marcel Karnstedt in DERI, Galway. There will be extensive opportunities for collaboration with other researchers and with other research groups and projects in DERI and Europe, as well as with other world-wide institutes with whom DERI collaborates. The expected duration of this position is 3 years, with the option to extend to a 4th year.

The application must be in either (X)HTML, pdf or plain text and must contain the following:

• A CV
• A one page statement explaining the candidate's interest in and compatibility with the objectives of the position
• A list of (minimum two) referees
• Additionally, publications, software and other artefacts that the student may be consider relevant - as links to resources available online

Applications that do not follow this format will not be considered. Applications, as well as further questions, should be directed per mail to Dr. Marcel Karnstedt at marcel.karnstedt@deri.org .

The Place

Galway is one of the most beautiful Irish cities shaped by artistic communities, active student life, innovative industry and leading edge research. Galway is located at the beautiful west coast of Ireland within the Galway Bay, 'between' Europe and the U.S., making it an ideal hub for national, European and international research.

Closing date: Jun 30th, 2010.

Research Associate – eGovernment Domain (DEG) Research Unit (18 Month Contract)

Advertised Salary Range: Research Associate Scale 6

The eGovernment Domain (DEG) at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) of the National University of Ireland, Galway invites applications for a postdoctoral fellowship in the area of semantic technologies for eGovernment and eParticipation.

Essential academic qualifications:

• The successful candidate should have at least a Masters degree in computer science

Essential experience:

• Significant research experience (at least 4 years) in the area of eGovernment, SOA, CWE, social software, and the Semantic Web.
• Publishing record in the eGovernment, CWE and the Semantic Web domains.
• Strong record of participation in (large-scale) research projects (Experience with European and Irish national projects is a definite plus for applicants)

Essential skills:

• Leadership and team work ability
• Project coordination
• Excellent communication skills, verbal and written, in English
• Motivated and proactive attitude to take ownership and initiative in research assignments
• Willingness and ability for/of funding acquisition
• Excellent analysis and problem solving skills
• Strong technical skills with experience in Web development, including Drupal, RDF, Java, PHP, Web Services, Database management.

Main duties of the post:

The successful candidate will participate in research, scientific, and management activities within the eGovernment research unit. As a research associate s/he will

• Be actively involved in the project coordination/management of the Puzzled by Policy, eParticipation project
• Support and coordinate research work in progress in the Rural Inclusion, eGovernment project
• Support existing running projects in the area of eGovernment

The duration of the post will be for 18 months

Applications should include a CV, motivation letter, full publication list and contact details for three references. We invite your application by e-mail to hr.ie@deri.org. . For further information on the post please contact Dr. Vassilios Peristeras at vassilios.peristeras@deri.org.

Closing date for submissions: 5pm on 14th May 2010.

Post-doctoral Fellowship in Reasoning and Querying for the Semantic Web

DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway

The Reasoning and Querying Unit [1] at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) of the National University of Ireland, Galway invites applications for a postdoctoral fellowship in the are of Reasoning and Querying for the Semantic Web.

DERI, a leading research institute in semantic technologies, offers a stimulating, dynamic and multi-cultural research environment, excellent ties to research-groups worldwide and close collaboration with industrial partners. DERI's Unit for Reasoning and Querying focuses on improving the scalability and investigating the adequacy of traditional reasoning and query answering techniques for the Web, where several classical assumptions no longer hold as data is heterogeneous, distributed, possibly incomplete or contradictory, structured in different levels of granularity, varying in levels of trust and accessible only by following implicit or explicit security policies. Research is performed in collaboration with other DERI units and industrial partners.

Applicants should hold a PhD degree in a relevant discipline with a strong theoretical background and an excellent proven research record; industrial project experience being distinct advantage. We are looking for both experienced candidates and candidates who just finished their PhD, salaries will be determined based on experience, cf. [2] for salary scales.

We expect:

• a solid background and proven excellent research record in fields including (but not limited to) database theory, distributed databases, data integration, (deductive) reasoning, semi-structured data and XML technologies, policies and trust, Semantic Web languages and applications, knowledge representation, Web Services technologies
• willingness to engage in proposals to secure future funding
• a proactive attitude towards solving problems, and the ability to work in teams and guide younger researchers

For more information about the research conducted in our group, please refer to [1]. Note that we strictly aim at broadening the expertise in our group, that is new/complementary areas of expertise are a distinct advantage.

Applications should be sent by May 30th 2010 and include a CV, motivation letter, full publication list and contact details for three references. For further information please contact Dr. Axel Polleres at axel.polleres@deri.org

References:

1. URQ
2. NUIG

Fully funded PhD Positions in Semantic Reality

Until now the virtual world of information sources on the World Wide Web and the activities in the real world have always been separated. However, information on the Web (the virtual world) may influence the activities in the real world (and vice versa), but these influences are usually indirect and not immediate. The advent of sensor technologies and the Semantic Web provide the unique opportunity to unify the real and the virtual worlds as for the first time we have the necessary infrastructures in place or large-scale deployment will happen in the short term. Their combination will enable us to build very large information spaces and infrastructures which for the first time facilitate the information-driven integration of the physical world and computers. Similarly, as the Internet has changed the way people communicate in the virtual world, Semantic Reality extends this vision to the physical world, enabling novel ways for humans to interact with their environment and facilitating interactions among entities of the physical world (Internet of Things). The physical world will be represented in cyberspace and information on our environment will become ubiquitously available on the Internet.

The Candidate

Applicants must have a strong background in Computer Science and/or closely related areas (e.g. Mathematics, Statistics or Engineering with strong emphasis on Computer Science) and excellent skills in both written and spoken English, as the working language of the Faculty is English. A background in large-scale distributed information systems, stream databases, management of time-dependant information, stream query processing systems, provenance, knowledge of semantic web technologies and linked open data are an assest but not a must.

The Position

The position is full-time, located at DERI Galway. Salary is competitive and depends on qualifications and experience. Candidates are requested to submit a cover letter, an academic curriculum vitae, and the names of 3 references to hr.ie@deri.org quoting "Semantic Reality" in the subject of the mail.

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Funded PhD Studentship in Dynamic Network Analysis, Mining and Modelling

Digital Enterprise Research Institute, NUI Galway

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland Galway is seeking applications for a funded PhD studentship in Dynamic Network Analysis, Mining and Modelling.

The successful candidate will join the Clique Strategic Research Cluster in DERI at NUI Galway. Clique is a Science Foundation Ireland funded research cluster addressing the development of analytical, modelling and visualisation techniques for large scale, dynamic graphs and networks. The cluster is distributed between DERI and University College Dublin, and has industry partners such as IBM. The DERI group conducts fundamental algorithmic work as well as investigating and modelling the principles underlying the evolution and interactions in large social, communication and collaborative networks. Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

Analysing user roles in social networks and designing efficient algorithms to find these [1];

Analysing and modelling the interactions between online communities [2];

Formulating predictive models for information diffusion in social and collaborative networks;

Designing efficient graph algorithms to find evolving communities with correlated change behaviour [3];

Designing scalable, distributed, real-time algorithms to tackle problems in massive dynamic graph datasets;

The successful candidate should have at least a bachelor’s degree in computer science, maths, science or engineering, and have the pre-requisites for PhD studies at NUI Galway. The PhD studentship covers academic fees, a generous monthly stipend and a research travel allowance for a three year period.

In addition, the following criteria are desirable but not necessary:

• Familiarity with graph algorithms and theory (e.g., finding connected components efficiently);
• Familiarity with modelling and simulation;
• Familiarity with social network analysis;
• Familiarity with large-scale, distributed, dynamic data analysis (e.g., data streaming algorithms);
• Familiarity with data mining, feature selection and machine learning, especially graph mining and graph grammars;
• Masters or equivalent degree in a relevant discipline or topic

The successful candidate will work with the DERI Principle Investigator, Dr. Conor Hayes, Dr. Jeffrey Chan and Dr. Marcel Karnstedt in DERI, Galway. There will be extensive opportunities for collaboration with other Clique researchers and with other research groups and projects in DERI.

Interested applicants should send an application with the subject header CLIQUE_PhD_10 to conor.hayes@deri.org. The application must contain the following: a CV, a one page statement explaining the candidate's interest in and compatibility with the objectives of the position and a list of referees. Applications that do not follow this format will not be considered. Closing date: May 30th, 2010.

References:

[1] Jeffrey Chan and Conor Hayes, “Decomposing Discussion Forums using User Roles”, in Proceedings of 2nd Web Science Conference 2010, USA, 2010.
[2] Marcel Karnstedt and Conor Hayes, “Towards Cross-Community Effects in Scientific Communities”, in Knowledge Discovery, Data Mining and Machine Learning, 2009.
[3] Jeffrey Chan, James Bailey and Christopher Leckie, “Discovering correlated spatio-temporal changes in evolving graphs”, in Knowledge and Information Systems, 16(1), 2008.

Other Positions

We are continuously seeking to fill the following positions:

Senior Researchers

Post Doctoral Researchers

PhD Students

Scientific Programmers

Software Engineers

Research Assistants

The main areas of interest are:

• Semantic Web and Social Software
• Semantic Web Services
• Semantic Desktop
• Data Intensive Infrastructures
• Reasoning and Querying
• Semantic Collaborative Software
• Service Oriented Architecture
• Information Mining and Retrieval
• Natural Language Processing
• Sensor Middleware
• eBusiness and Financial Services
• Health Care and Life Sciences
• eGovernment
• Green IT

We offer:

• a stimulating, dynamic, multi-cultural research environment
• excellent ties to research groups worldwide
• regular exchange tracks with Stanford and other universities
• close collaboration with leading industrial partners
• up-to-date infrastructure and resources, including funding to attend international conferences

We expect:

• a strong background in computer science
• for Post Doc and Senior research positions, an excellent PhD degree in Computer Science or related disciplines or an equivalent academic degree or relevant industry experience
• research interests in Information Management, Systems Development, Logic, Ontology Languages, Semantic Web Services, Semantics in Business Information Systems, or related Semantic Web topics, and
• the willingness to combine formal scientific work with application-oriented research in projects funded by the European Commission and national agencies. We are looking for individuals who will continue their existing stream of research in related areas within our ongoing and new research projects.

DERI is very interested in receiving more applications from researches who are interested in applying for Postgraduate and Postdoctoral Funding through the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology (IRCSET). IRCSET has some excellent funding schemes available to potential DERI researchers - please check the details on regular basis on the following sites:

• Postgraduate Scholarship Scheme
• Postdoctoral Fellowship Schemes

Check the terms and FAQs associated with these grants and if appropriate to your application please highlight your interest in applying for IRCSET funding on your application to DERI.

We invite your application by e-mail to hr.ie@deri.org if you wish to apply to DERI Galway. Please include a current resume, a list of publications, and digital versions of your most relevant works (& thesis if appropriate).

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