PhD Scholarships at RMIT University

.The School of CS&IT at RMIT University has 6 PhD scholarships available for students interested in designing scalable Information Retrieval systems. The positions will be based in Melbourne, Australia which has been rated as the World's most liveable city for three consecutive years according to the Economist (http://www.eiu.com/site_info.asp?info_name= The_Global_Liveability_Report). The positions can commence anytime in 2014.

Applicants should have some prior exposure and interest in one or more of the following areas: Information Retrieval, Databases, Algorithms / Data Structures, Natural Language Processing, and/or Data Mining. They should also have good technical skills, including good programming skills (C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby), and should have a good command of spoken and written English. Prior research experience is highly desirable. To be eligible for these scholarships you must have an honours/master degree in the area of Computer Science or related disciplines and meet RMIT’s PhD entry requirements.

PROJECT 1: Efficient and effective algorithms for top-k document retrieval

SUPERVISOR: Shane Culpepper

SUMMARY: The goal of this project is to develop new indexing and query processing algorithms for efficient and effective rank-aware text retrieval. Efficient algorithm design for big data is an increasingly important problem as energy costs continue to soar, and can now exceed hardware costs. In this project, two important problems in scalable web search are explored: real-time indexing and long query processing. Possible topic specialisations include suffix-based or inverted indexing, data compression, distributed or parallel text processing, and natural language processing for information retrieval. (2 PhD Positions available)

PROJECT 2: Improving web search using structured and unstructured geospatial information

SUPERVISORS: Timos Sellis and Shane Culpepper

SUMMARY: This project will investigate new approaches to ranked retrieval for location-aware search. Close to 20% of all web search queries contain location information, and this number is expected to continue growing as users become increasingly dependent on mobile devices for all of their daily Internet activities. We intend to combine state-of-the-art research from two domains: spatial keyword search in databases and ad-hoc search in Information Retrieval to improve the overall quality of search results. (2 PhD Positions available)

PROJECT 3: Effective summaries for search results

SUPERVISORS: Mark Sanderson and Falk Scholer

SUMMARY: Search engines return a search result page, which lists short summaries of each retrieved document. However, recent work has shown that users often fail to click on potentially useful documents, because of poor summary quality.  This project will take a new approach to the understanding, design, and construction of such summaries. To enhance search result summaries, this project will model how users determine document relevance when inspecting a summary; it will exploit a previously untapped source of information to dramatically improve summary quality; and it will create a new approach to retrieving relevant documents by considering their summarisability. (1 PhD Position available)

PROJECT 4:  Sub-collection retrieval: understanding and improving search engines    

SUPERVISORS: Mark Sanderson and Falk Scholer

SUMMARY: Modern search engines need to find useful answers from vast collections of diverse documents. Currently, a single ranking function is used to identify candidate answers. However, our recent pilot work has shown that using different ranking approaches for different parts of a document collection has the potential to significantly boost search performance. This project will analyse different definitions of sub collections, and study which features of ranking functions lead to different performance on distinct types of documents. This new knowledge will lead to a deeper understanding of search systems, and be used to create new ranking approaches, substantially improving on current search techniques, and benefiting all users of such tools.  (1 PhD Position available)

REMUNERATION: AU$24,500 per annum (tax free). Project 1 may also include an additional $5,000 for conference travel and a $3,000 top-up per annum depending on the applicant's track record. 

ELIGIBILITY: To be eligible for this scholarship you must meet RMIT's PhD entry requirements (http://www.rmit.edu.au/browse;ID=DR221;VIEW=INTL)

DEADLINE: 31 March 2014

HOW TO APPLY: To apply for one of these scholarships, you must complete an application consisting of:

- a one page research proposal outlining your interest and suitability for the project;

- a detailed curriculum vitae;

- undergraduate and honours/master transcripts; and

- contact details of two referees.

Submit your application via email directly to Associate Professor Xiaodong Li (xiaodong.li@rmit.edu.au). Please clearly indicate which of the projects you are applying for.

FURTHER INFORMATION: For further information about the specific projects listed above, please email the relevant supervisors: 

{shane.culpepper | mark.sanderson | falk.scholer | timos.sellis} @rmit.edu.au

Additional information about the RMIT School of Computer Science and IT, as well as general information about the CSIT PhD program, is available at http://www.rmit.edu.au/compsci .

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