[Corpora-List] Three PhD student positions in information retrieval

[Djoerd Hiemstra]

Three PhD student positions in information retrieval

Position: Distributed Information Retrieval

The Database Group of the University of Twente offers a job opening in
the NWO Vidi Project "Distributed Information Retrieval by means of
Keyword Auctions". The project's aim is to distribute internet search
functionality in such a way that communities of users and/or federations
of small search systems provide search services in a collaborative way.
Instead of getting all data to a centralized point and process queries
centrally, as is done by today's search systems, the project will
distribute queries over many small autonomous search systems and process
them locally. In this project, the PhD student will research a new
approach to distribute search: distributed information retrieval by
means of keyword auctions. Keyword auctions like Google's AdWords give
advertisers the opportunity to provide targeted advertisements by
bidding on specific keywords. Analogous to these keyword auctions, local
search systems will bid for keywords at a central broker. They "pay" by
serving queries for the broker. The broker will send queries to those
local search systems that optimize the overall effectiveness of the
system, i.e., local search systems that are willing to serve many
queries, but also are able to provide high quality results. The PhD
student will work within a small team of researchers that approaches the
problem from three different angles: 1) modeling the local search
system, including models for automatic bidding and multi-word keywords,
2) modeling the search broker's optimization using the bids, the quality
of the answers, and click-through rates, and 3) integration of
structured data typically available behind web forms of local search
systems with text search.

See official announcement at:
http://www.utwente.nl/vacatures/vacatures_externe_werving/Externe%20vacatures%20WP/09-051-eng.doc
(Deadline: 19 April 2009)

=====
Two positions: PuppyIR, Information Retrieval for Children

The Groups Human Media Interaction and Databases of the University of
Twente offer two job openings in the European Project PuppyIR. Current
Information Retrieval (IR) systems are designed for adults: they return
information that is unsuitable for children, present information in
lists that children find difficult to manage and make it difficult for
children to ask for information. PuppyIR will create information search
services that are tailored to the specific needs of children, giving
children the opportunity to fully and safely exploit the power of the
Internet. PuppyIR will develop new interaction paradigms to allow
children to easily express their information need, to have results
presented in an intuitive way and to engage children in system
interaction. It will develop a set of Information Services: components
to summarize textual and audiovisual content for children, to help
children safely explore new information, to moderate information for
children at different ages, to build new social networks and to
intelligently aggregate and present information to children. PuppyIR
will offer an open source platform that enables system designers to
construct useful and usable information retrieval systems for children.
The project will demonstrate the effectiveness of the PuppyIR modules
through demonstrator systems constructed in collaboration with the
Netherlands Public Library Association and the Emma Children's Hospital.
At the university of Twente, a team of six senior researchers and three
PhD students will cooperate in PuppyIR. One PhD student will work on
user interaction design. The other two positions are described below.

Position 1: Analyzing and structuring textual information (at Human
Media Interaction) Analyzing and structuring textual information studies
how natural language processing tools can assist the organization of
information in a way that enables children to easily access the
information. The PhD student at Human Media Interaction will focus on
information extraction, text classification, and story understanding and
summarization on written and spoken data, for instance for questions or
comments created by children (e.g., chats, blogs) and content created
explicitly for children (e.g., stories).

Position 2: Multimedia content mining (at Databases) Multimedia content
mining will develop database search technology that enables better
understanding of the individual behavior of the child and consequently
his/her information need. The PhD student at Databases will focus on
concept retrieval, faceted search, query formulation assistance, and
intuitive relevance feedback mechanisms that allow children to easily
access the content of multimedia data sources, for instance for content
sharing within online groups including moderated discovery.

See official announcement at:
http://www.utwente.nl/vacatures/vacatures_externe_werving/Externe%20vacatures%20WP/09-052-eng.doc
(Deadline: 15 April 2009)


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