All Answers: [pakgrid] Postdoctoral position

Thursday, 8 December 2011

[pakgrid] Postdoctoral position - Social Networksâ€

Postdoctoral position in Social Networks - Ecole Centrale Paris

Networks and more precisely, Social Networks, take an increasing and incredibly important place in our lives and in the digital world nowadays. Moreover they bring new features and new possibilities every month.

Graph mining techniques like detection of communities are well known nowadays and can be interesting when applied on these networks, but most of the times, these methods work on classical graphs which are homogeneous and without attributes, while modern social networks must be modeled by heterogeneous attributed graphs. Indeed any person in a social network is not only a node in a graph, but has several important attributes: qualitative ones (like name, surname,...), but also quantitative ones (collected by the social network by example, or by geo-localization). The nature of links is not always the same for all entities in social networks unlike in classical graphs.

On the other hand grouping nodes of such networks is not the only useful task, because these real-world networks are also vectors of information, opinions and moods. Considering the huge quantity of data carried every day, the need for methods that monitor and organize this information increases constantly. Modern Social Networks are also very dynamic, as new nodes and new links appear every day; moreover, nodes, and more likely, links, disappear also every day. Predicting correctly such dis/appearance of nodes and links could be a valuable knowledge.

Finally, many uses of modern Social Networks are registered and are daily users of more than one Networks. As they are not always known with the same name in these networks, the entity resolution problem (i.e. determine which reference in the data/network refers to the same real-world entity) becomes a very interesting issue. In the same idea, the fusion/aggregation of results of clustering on several networks could bring new outlooks in graph mining.

Research topics for this postdoctoral position can be summarized by:
- graph mining on heterogeneous and/or attributed graphs,
- graph mining on social networks with geo-localization data,
- design models of information diffusion processes in social networks/media,
- prediction of changes in social networks,
- graph mining on several different networks.

Competencies and profile

Education, experience

Candidates should have a PhD in Computer Science. A strong academic record, excellent analytical skills and a clear aptitude for autonomous, creative research will be priority selection criteria.

Technical skills

- Solid background in Computer Science, good knowledge of graphs and social networks theory, principles and challenges, data mining and machine learning methods and algorithms.

- Strong experience in development tools for diverse environments.

- Strong programming skills.

- Good learning and adaptation capabilities.

- Excellent communication skills in English. French is not mandatory.

Environment and Location

Ecole Centrale Paris, an elite French Institution, was founded in 1829. It was the first major engineering school to train engineers in the early days of industry. Today the primary vocation of ECP is still to train scientific leaders, innovators and managers for industry, a role which gives it a unique position among the major French engineering schools.

URL: http://www.ecp.fr/lang/en/home/Centrale-Paris.

The Academic Chair in Business Intelligence aims at inventing the future of Business Intelligence, dealing with high-level semantics, reasoning about unstructured content and structured data, and providing a simplified access and a better understanding of BI tools. The team is composed of 1 faculty members, 2 postdoctoral researchers and 7 PhD students and is involved in European and National projects. See our website for more details: http://www.mas.ecp.fr/BI/New/.

Duration: 12 to 18 months

Start date: as soon as possible

Location: France (near Paris)

Annual gross salary: 35 000 Euros

How to apply

- A cover letter stating your motivation.

- A detailed CV including your PhD subject and a complete list of publications

- Recommendation letters from leaders in academia or the industry are a plus

Applications must be sent to (deadline: December, 15 2011)

Prof. Marie-Aude AUFAURE

Ecole Centrale Paris - MAS Laboratory

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