Post-doctoral position in Visual Analytics - University of Montpellier 2, France

Post-doctoral position in Visual Analytics 

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Location: LIRMM Lab (http://www.lirmm.fr/lirmm_eng/contact-us), Montpellier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montpellier), France

Title: Visual Analytics for heterogeneous text streams.

Abstract: 

The heterogeneity of data is an important issue in Big Data area. Data is not only large in volume and produced at a high speed (velocity), but also holds many kinds of input (technical heterogeneity), structures (data model heterogeneity), and meanings (semantic heterogeneity). We would like to recruit a postdoctoral researcher for one year to address this specific issue from a visual analytics approach.

Context:

A lot of documents (web pages, scientific publications, reports, and so forth) contain much useful information. Mining heterogeneous data, according to their structure and to their content, becomes a major issue in data mining area. A key problem consists of sharing these various data and/or information and integrating them in order to discover new knowledge. In addition, microbloggings contain crucial information to take into account in a global system that mines heterogeneous data. For instance, people participating in on-line forums, microblogging or discussing on social networks leave behind them digital traces of information on a variety of topics. The analysis of individual messages and their aggregation represent a considerable challenge for currently existing methods, as user-written texts present a special type of stream setting. In this project we plan to investigate the epidemiology issue of farmed animals in collaboration with UMR CMAEE. The aim is to detect weak signals concerning the beginning of epidemics (e.g., African swine fever, foot and mouth disease, bluetongue, avian influenza).

Description: 

Visual exploration of textual data is an active area of research. Most of the methods proposed deal with static texts like discourses, books or, more generally, string data. Most of these methods require well-formatted data and are not adapted to streams and/or heterogeneous data. The candidate will be in charge of discovering efficient text mining techniques for extracting structured data, and designing visual interfaces to interact with these structures and explore the data. He/She will process following the steps of the Munzner's nested model for visualization design. (1) Domain problem characterization: the candidate will learn about the tasks and the data of the target domain (2) Data/operation abstraction design: he/she will design the text mining techniques that transform the raw data into the data types that visualization techniques can address. (3) Encoding/interaction technique design: he/she will design the visual encodings and interactions. (4) Algorithm Design: he/she will create algorithms to carry out the visual encodings and interactions designs automatically. The candidate will also be in charge of organizing the validation process included in the Munzner's model.

Qualifications:

- A PhD degree in Computer Science on the domain of Information Visualization or Visual Analytics with interest in Text Mining.

- An excellent publication record, including papers in high-impact journals and conference proceedings.

- Strong experience in programming languages.

- Knowledge of visualization libraries (e.g. D3, GraphViz, ...) is an asset. 

- Must be proficient in English.

Supervision:

- The project will be formally jointly supervised by Dr. Arnaud Sallaberry at LIRMM (http://www.lirmm.fr/~sallaberry/) and Dr. Mathieu Roche at TETIS (http://www.lirmm.fr/~mroche).

Starting date:

- September/October 2014 (some flexibility is possible)

Conditions of employment:

- Net salary: ~ 2200 euros / month

- Interested candidates are requested to send an application by e-mail to Dr. Arnaud Sallaberry (arnaud.sallaberry@lirmm.fr) and Dr. Mathieu Roche (mathieu.roche@cirad.fr) with the subject field: 'LABEX: Post-Doc visualization position'. 

- The application should consist of a motivation letter and a curriculum vitae with a list of publications and description of any previous research. Furthermore, names and contact information for three references are required (with two letters of recommendation). 

- Applications will be reviewed immediately and the review process will continue until the position is filled.

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Mathieu Roche
Research Scientist (PhD, HDR)
CIRAD - Environments and Societies Department
UMR TETIS
Web (in English): www.lirmm.fr/~mroche
Web (in French): http://agents.cirad.fr/index.php/Mathieu+ROCHE