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Thursday, 8 December 2011

[pakgrid] Postdoctoral position - Ontology Engineering

Research position: Dynamic and modular enrichment of ontologies for mobile search

Ecole Centrale Paris

With the continual increase of the volume of available information on the Web, information access and knowledge management become challenging. Thus, adding a semantic dimension to the Web, by the deployment of ontologies, contributes to solve many problems. During this last decade, several approaches of ontology learning have proposed a partial automation of knowledge acquisition from structured, semi structured or unstructured data sources (data base, knowledge base, texts, etc.). Knowing that a unique data source cannot cover all concepts of a target domain of knowledge, recent projects consider the Web as a learning source from which domain ontologies can be extracted.

Furthermore, modularity principle has become an important issue to overcome scalability problems in ontology engineering. The challenge is to extract modular and dynamic ontology modules from external data sources. Such sources could be text documents, folksonomies, databases, or other ontologies/knowledge bases. Each source requires a different method of content extraction handled by the information discovery component which can be a time consuming process.

The aim of this work is to design dynamic operators for ontology module enrichment from external sources in order to be integrated in mobile search system. Machine learning and statistical techniques are required to discover new concepts, attributes, relations or entities.

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 machine learning techniques and ontology formalisms.

- Strong experience in development tools for mobile environments.

- Strong programming skills.

- Good learning and adaptation capabilities.

- Excellent communication skills in English. French is not mandatory. Mandarin speaking is a plus.

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. See our website for more details: http://www.mas.ecp.fr/BI/New/.

This posdoctoral position is related to the EU funded PARLANCE project: http://perso.ecp.fr/~aufaurema/project.htm, https://sites.google.com/site/parlanceprojectofficial/

Duration: 18 months

Start date: as soon as possible

Location: France (near Paris)

Annual gross salary: around 35 000 Euros including health insurance

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 15th 2011:)

Prof. Marie-Aude AUFAURE

Ecole Centrale Paris - MAS Laboratory

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