Funded PhD positions in the area of Interactive Information Retrieval at Rutgers iSchool

The School of Communication & Information (SC&I) at Rutgers University invites applications from talented and energetic prospective students wanting to help shape the future of research in Information Retrieval, Social Media, and related areas. Rutgers is one of the premier research universities in the US and is located very close to New York City.

Rutgers: http://www.rutgers.edu/
SC&I: http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/

SC&I PhD program: http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/ph-d-program/getting-in-admission-aid.html

iSchool concentration of the PhD program: http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/phd-program/lis-concentration.html

We have multiple openings to fully support PhD students for research focusing on information retrieval/seeking, social media, and their intersection. Specifically, Prof. Nick Belkin and Prof. Chirag Shah are looking for new PhD students to work with them on their newly funded NSF project on "Characterizing and Evaluating Whole Session Interactive Information Retrieval" (http://infoseeking.org/iir/). The funding includes full tuition waiver, competitive stipend, and travel support.

The deadline for application with a consideration for financial assistant is January 15th (apply earlier if possible).

Finally, know that we have a fairly centralized application process, which means we do not get to make any decisions about whether or not to accept a given student -- it is a much more holistic evaluation of each applicant's overall promise done by the graduate school and the PhD faculty at SC&I.

That said, if you are applying with a particular interest in information retrieval/seeking or social media, please 1) mention our names in your statement of interest, and 2) send us a brief email with a link to your CV so we can keep an eye out for your application and put a good word in for you. We receive *many* such emails so unfortunately cannot reply to all, but trust we'll receive it if you send it.

Best,

Nick Belkin

Chirag Shah

Rutgers University

****

Chirag Shah, PhD

Assistant Professor of Information and Computer Science

Rutgers University

4 Huntington St, New Brunswick NJ 08901

p. (848) 932-8807 f. (732) 932-6916

http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~chirags

Research Associate Position at UCL Web Science Group, London

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral research associate to work with Dr Emine Yilmaz on the project "Adaptive User Modelling for Personalized Experience".

The project concerns the development of new models and algorithms to model scientific content in terms of topics/themes and develop novel user interest models based on user's content engagement activities. The goal is to build adaptive models which incorporate variations in user preferences to deliver personalized experiences in a range of possible practical applications.

The associate will be part of the UCL Web Science group in the Computer Science department based out of the Bloomsbury campus in central London. The Web Science group is affiliated with the MediaFutures/CSML groups at UCL with several close links to relevant industry (Microsoft, Google, BBC, Elsevier) alongside a vibrant academic environment fostering collaboration.

Application Close Date: 4 January 2015

Contact: If you have any queries regarding the vacancy or the application process, please contact Emine Yilmaz (emine.yilmaz@ucl.ac.uk)

Candidate Background:

The ideal candidate will have:

• a PhD (or will shortly be assessed for a PhD) in Computer Science or related areas with a strong background in Machine Learning and/or Information Retrieval
• experience in at least one of probabilistic graphical models, approximate inference, or bayesian nonparametrics is required (as demonstrated by a strong publication record)
• previous experience on personalization techniques and analysing large volumes of data is highly desirable
• experience on topic modelling and query log analysis is a big plus
  Further details & application link can be found here

Tenure Track Assistant Professor in University of California Santa Cruz: Economic and Information Networks

http://apo.ucsc.edu/academic_employment/jobs/JPF00218-15.pdf

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ

Baskin school of engineering

DEPARTMENT OF TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT

Assistant Professor in Economic and Information Networks

The Baskin School of Engineering (BSoE) at the University of
California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) invites applications for a tenure track
position in the Technology Management Department at the Assistant
Professor level. We seek outstanding candidates who do empirical
and/or analytical fundamental research in information economics,
network science, computational advertising or marketing analytics,
mechanism design, or computational/algorithmic economics. Technology
Management is one of seven departments hosted in the Baskin School of
Engineering and is currently undergoing an exciting growth phase in
our focus areas of Management, Data Science, and the Economics of
Information and/or Technology.

Relevant disciplines for this position include Computer Science,
Economics, Electrical Engineering, Industrial and Systems Engineering,
Operations Research, Management, Statistics (particularly temporal,
streaming, massive data, and causal modeling), Social Sciences (causal
and longitudinal modeling), or other relevant interdisciplinary
programs.

The successful candidate will be expected to maintain an active
research program with evidence of a developed research trajectory,
teach courses that contribute to the Technology Management Department
undergraduate and graduate degree programs, mentor and advise students
at the graduate and undergraduate level individually and in the
classroom, and undertake service obligations for the department and
campus consistent with a ladder-rank faculty member. Applicants are
expected to develop externally funded research programs. The candidate
must be able to work with students, faculty, and staff from a wide
range of social and cultural backgrounds. We are especially interested
in candidates who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of
the academic community.

This position will contribute to UCSC's initiative to expand research
and teaching in the Silicon Valley. The successful candidate will have
a presence on campus (in Santa Cruz) and at the UCSC Silicon Valley
Campus (in Santa Clara). The candidate will be expected to help build
academic programs in Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz.

RANK: Assistant Professor

SALARY: Commensurate with qualifications and experience; academic year
(9-month) basis

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS: Ph.D. or equivalent foreign degree in relevant
field listed above expected to be conferred by June 30, 2015;
Demonstrated record of research and teaching.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS: Strong training in empirical and/or
analytical research methods; research with applications in
computational advertising and marketing analytics, auctions,
crowd-sourcing, gaming, information aggregation, machine learning and
statistics in markets, market interfaces, mechanism design, market
makers, monetization, preference elicitation, scoring rules, or social
media.

POSITION AVAILABLE: July 1, 2015, with academic year beginning September 2015

TO APPLY Applications are accepted via the UCSC Academic Recruit
online system, and must include: 1) letter of application; 2)
curriculum vitae; 3) research statement; 4) teaching statement; 5) 1-3
publications; 6) 3–5 confidential letters of reference*; 7) instructor
teaching evaluations (optional). Applicants are invited to submit a
statement addressing their contributions to diversity through
research, teaching, and/or service. Documents/materials must be
submitted as PDF files.

Apply at https://recruit.ucsc.edu/apply/JPF00218
Refer to Position #JPF00218-15 in all correspondence

*All letters will be treated as confidential per University of
California policy and California state law. For any reference letter
provided via a third party (i.e., dossier service, career center),
direct the author to UCSC's confidentiality statement at
http://apo.ucsc.edu/confstm.htm

CLOSING DATE: Review of applications will begin on January 5, 2015. To
ensure full consideration, applications should be complete and letters
of recommendation received by this date. The position will remain open
until filled, but not later than 6/30/2015.

UC Santa Cruz faculty make significant contributions to the body of
research that has earned the University of California the ranking as
the foremost public higher education institution in the world. In the
process, our faculty demonstrate that cutting-edge research, excellent
teaching and outstanding service are mutually supportive.

The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative
Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration
for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national
origin, disability, age, or protected veteran status. UC Santa Cruz is
committed to excellence through diversity and strives to establish a
climate that welcomes, celebrates, and promotes respect for the
contributions of all students and employees. Inquiries regarding the
University's equal employment opportunity policies may be directed to:
Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064; (831) 459-2686.

Under Federal law, the University of California may employ only
individuals who are legally able to work in the United States as
established by providing documents as specified in the Immigration
Reform and Control Act of 1986. Certain UCSC positions funded by
federal contracts or sub-contracts require the selected candidate to
pass an E-Verify check. More information is available here or from the
Academic Personnel Office (APO) at (831) 459-4300.

UCSC is a smoke & tobacco-free campus.

If you need accommodation due to a disability, please contact the
Academic Personnel Office at apo@ucsc.edu (831) 459-4300.

                   VISIT THE APO WEB SITE AT: http://apo.ucsc.edu
--
-----------------------------------
Yi Zhang
Associate Professor
Baskin School of Engineering
SOE 3, University of California, Santa Cruz
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA, USA 95064
Phone: (831) 459-4549
Fax: (831) 459-4829

Room 319, UCSC Silicon Valley Center
2505 Augustine Drive
Santa Clara, CA 95054
Phone: (408) 9198907


.

Faculty Position at Georgetown University Department of Computer Science (1 Assistant Professor and 1 Senior Faculty Position)

Dear Colleagues,

  Thank you for considering or forwarding to any and all who would be of interest!  The Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University is hiring. We are looking for tenure track positions, one at the junior level and another at the senior level. Both positions are for large-scale data analytics:

The Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University invites applications for a tenure-track position in Computer Science at the Assistant Professor level. We are particularly interested in applicants with expertise in large-scale data analytics, which includes web analytics, data science, database, data mining, machine learning, applied algorithms, data and visual analytic systems, or related fields. A successful candidate is one who has demonstrated ability to conduct high-quality research in one or more of the areas of interest and has the potential to excel in teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The proposed start date is August 2015.  
Required Qualifications: Applicants must have a Ph.D. in Computer Science or a closely related field. The degree must be completed before August 2015.
Applications received by January 15, 2015, will receive full consideration for first-round interviews though later applications are welcome.
Georgetown University, which attracts some of the very best students in the country and world, is located in the heart Washington, D.C., a city that provides opportunities to connect with government agencies as well as high-tech industries.

Application site: http://cs.georgetown.edu/assistant-prof-ad-2014

Research Challenge: 2015 ACM India SIGKDD Conference on Data Sciences (IKDD CODS)

Important Dates:

Abstract:                            15th Jan 2015
2-page submission:           15th Feb 2015
Notification of acceptance: 28th Feb 2015
Final presentation:              19th Mar 2015
-----------------------

CODS 2015 Research Challenge

A City Traffic Dashboard based on Social Network Data

About the Challenge:

Imagine Indian Government has made you responsible for leveraging
Internet and Social Media portals for better monitoring and management
of traffic in Indian cities. You know that the popular social network
portals are daily fraught with traffic issues from Indian roads in the
form of text, image and video. Further, city traffic authorities have
started to feed into these portals furnishing them with information
about traffic movement (or the lack of that). However these desperate
pieces of information spanning over timelines of innumerable Indian
commuters have not been harnessed to the effective monitoring and
management of traffic.

You would like to design an application which can give real insights
from the fast flowing streaming data on these platforms - what is
working good and what is not; which areas are facing severe traffic
problems; what are the most pressing traffic related problems citizens
in different cities are complaining about (e.g. wrong_parking,
heavy_vehicles, auto_refusal etc.); how things have changed after
additional traffic management people have been introduced across
cities last month and so on. A city-based as well as a national
interactive dashboard with great visualization would help you to
easily interact with the data. It will enable you to get views at
different levels upto actual text/image/video as well as temporal
analysis of data.

The CODS 2015 Research Challenge is giving you an opportunity to
design and develop innovative software application (or dashboard) for
city traffic management using publicly available social network data.

Technical Task:

Design and develop a software application (or dashboard) for
analysing, monitoring and comparing traffic issues in different Indian
cities based on relevant interactions on Internet based social network
portals. Unlike common data analysis challenges, this is an open ended
and exploratory task.

Data:

Given the exploratory nature of this challenge we are fine with the
participants to decide and use any relevant social network portals as
their data source(s). At the minimum, they need to use the Facebook
pages of Traffic Authorities of following cities - the posts (and
other details) from these pages can be crawled using Facebook Graph
API

o   Bangalore - https://www.facebook.com/BangaloreTrafficPolice

o   Chennai - https://www.facebook.com/chennaitrafficpolice

o   Kolkata - https://www.facebook.com/KolkataTrafficPolice

o   New Delhi -
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Delhi-TrafficPolice/117817371573308

·         Participants are free to include any publicly accessible
information of the following nature.

o   Traffic Authorities Facebook pages of other Indian cities.

o   Information from timeline (newsfeed, profile etc.) of relevant
public or private organizations in any social network portal including
Facebook and Twitter.

o   Relevant posts (messages, photos, videos etc.) by individuals on
any social network portal.

o   Related information such as news articles, weather data,
population data, vehicle data etc.

Rules:

·         Only publicly available data can be used and should be cited
in the submissions. No proprietary data source which does not offer
free access to all can be used.

·         Participants have to develop the software applications
entirely by themselves. They can use open-source software packages
with appropriate citations in their submissions.

·         Each group cannot have more than 4-members who do not
necessarily have to be from the same organization/institution.

Submission and Important Dates:

Interested participants are encouraged to get started immediately –
following are important dates.

1.     15th January, 2015: Each team has to submit a plain-text
abstract of length less than 500 words describing their application,
features and data sources used. This submission will be used for
reviewer assignment only for the 2-page paper due after one month– no
notification will be sent based on this submission.

2.       15th February, 2015: Each team has to submit a 2-page paper
describing their system and data analysis techniques.

a.       The submission should be formatted in ACM proceedings format,
using one of the templates available at
http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. Templates are
available in Word and LaTeX (version 2e). For the LaTeX formats, you
may use either the standard style or the SIG-alternate style.

b.      We encourage and will give preference to submissions with
(links to) web-based demonstration, video, screenshots, wireframe
designs, and mock-ups of developed applications.

3.     28th February, 2015: Shortlisted teams will be notified for
participation in CODS Research Challenge session.

4.     19th March, 2015: CODS Research Challenge presentation and
demonstration session followed by announcement of winners.

Evaluation:

The panel is to going to evaluate each submission based on multiple
criteria such as:

·         Insights: Nature of insights obtained based on historical
data - quantity, quality and surprise factor

·         Real-time: Ability to ingest future data in real-time and
update insights and visualization

·         Techniques: Novelty of data processing, mining and learning
techniques used

·         Visualization: Visual appeal and user interaction features
of dashboard

Award:

·         Shortlisted teams based on abstract and paper submission
will be eligible to present and demonstrate their application to CODS
Conference participants.

·         The winner and first two runner ups (chosen by an expert
panel and conference attendees) will get cash award for INR 30,000,
20,000 and 15,000 respectively.

·         The top-3 teams will be invited to write a 4-page paper to
be included in ACM CODS proceedings.

Contact:

·         Shourya Roy shourya.roy@xerox.com

·         Ramasuri Narayanam ramasurn@in.ibm.com

Postdoctoral Research Fellow position in Data Curation at Trinity College Dublin

Hi All,

the Knowledge and Data Engineering Group [1], School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin is seeking a full-time researcher for the ALIGNED H2020 project [2] in Software and Data Engineering for large scale historical dataset curation.

The role will be part of a self-managing team developing the Dacura data curation platform [3] in conjunction with Humanities and Social Science researchers from The Evolution Institute's Seshat: Global History Databank [4]. Within ALIGNED we will work with other leading European universities and enterprises to develop aligned methods of data and software engineering for web-scale systems.

The ideal candidate will have a PhD and an excellent research track record in a relevant field (semantics, digital humanities, web technologies, statistical NLP, HCI, information retrieval) and strong web programming skills.

This is a 2 year contract position with a salary between €40,003k and €46,255k, depending on skills and experience.

Full details on the post are here: http://kdeg.cs.tcd.ie/aligned-project-post-doctoral-research-fellow

Deadline for applications: 8 Dec 2014

Send a CV and covering letter to: rob.brennan@cs.tcd.ie

best regards

Rob Brennan

Senior Research Fellow & ALIGNED Project Co-ordinator

Knowledge and Data Engineering Group
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

[1] http://kdeg.cs.tcd.ie/
[2] http://www.aligned-project.eu/
[3] http://dacura.cs.tcd.ie/
[4] http://evolution-institute.org/seshat