#socialsemanticweb

Interested in the Semantic Web and in Social Software ? Want to work on the exciting field of their integration with sensor data ? Want to join DERI ? Here's an current open (and fully-funded) Ph.D. position in DERI for the new EU project SPITFITRE, starting soon. If any questions, feel free to contact me at my @deri email. Edit: In addition, there is a second position open for the same project, essentially focused on querying and mining sensor data. You can check both on the jobs section of the DERI website.

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland Galway is seeking applications for a fully-funded Ph.D. position in Modeling Sensor Data and incorporating Social Feedback and Community Sharing. The successful candidate will join the EU-funded FP7 SPITFIRE project team in DERI at NUI Galway: Semantic-Service Provisioning for the Internet of Things using Future Internet Research by Experimentation.

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Galway (DERI) is one of the largest semantic research organization in the world. DERI's mission is to enable networked knowledge, globally interlinking information from the Web and the physical world. DERI is based in Galway is one of the most beautiful Irish cities shaped by artistic communities, active student life, innovative industry and leading edge research. Galway is located at the beautiful west coast of Ireland within the Galway Bay, 'between' Europe and the U.S., making it an ideal hub for national, European and international research.

SPITFIRE is an international project funded by the European Union working towards the realisation of a stronger connection between the natural and the digital worlds. The goal of this project is to investigate unified concepts, methods and software infrastructures that facilitate the efficient development of applications that span and integrate the Internet and the embedded (i.e., sensor) world, and make use of state-of-the-art Web and Semantic Web technologies to achieve this goal. SPITFIRE will drastically lower the effort required for developing robust, interoperable and scalable applications in the Internet of Things. This will facilitate new kinds of applications and services that are not possible to date and thus have an impact on research, industry and private households. The project consortium consists of academic and industrial partners from Ireland, Germany, Greece and Belgium. It is coordinated by DERI, NUI Galway.

The successful candidate is expected to work towards (1) the modeling of sensor data as Linked Data, (2) the incorporation of user-feedback for validating sensor description and (3) collaborative methods for sharing sensor description and related queries at Web scale. This will provide new methods and techniques for enabling sensor data description being available on the Web, being able to share these description within communities of interest. Use-cases where such methods could be deployed include Ambient Intelligence and Reality Mining. Ambient Intelligence is focused around personal applications, varying dependent on context, user’s goals, user roles, relations and entities. Reality Mining deals with the investigation and modelling of principles underlying the evolution and interactions in large social, communication and collaborative networks derived from individual sensors and their data.

The work will be achieved in close cooperation with other units and projects in DERI, as well as with the other partners from the SPITFIRE consortium. The FIRE initiative and its large-scale experimental facilities provide the unique opportunity to evaluate the developed methods and algorithms at large scale and in a realistic environment.

Areas of interest include - but are not limited to:

Modelling Sensor data as Linked Open Data and using ontology engineering best practices

Incorporating user-feedback in output of mined sensor description

Designing social software and community sharing applications for sensor data

Querying sensor data and sharing queries description in online communities

The successful candidate should have at least a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, science or engineering (M.Sc. is a plus), have the pre-requisites for Ph.D. studies at NUI Galway, and must be fluent in english. The Ph.D. position covers academic fees, a generous monthly stipend and a research travel allowance for a three year period, as well as the use of DERI's facilities for experimentations and research. The Ph.D. position is initially funded for a 3-years duration, with subject to extension to 4-years.

The following criteria are expected from the student:

Interest with Semantic Web technologies (RDF(S)/OWL, SPARQL, etc.) and Linked Data

Interest and familiarity with social software (blogs, wikis, microblogging, etc.)

Interest for standardisation processes

Good programming skills

Good english writing skills

The successful candidate will work with the DERI Principle Investigator Prof. Manfred Hauswirth and Dr. Alexandre Passant in DERI, NUI Galway. There will be extensive opportunities for collaboration with other researchers and with other research groups and projects in DERI and in Europe, as well as in other world-wide institutes with whom DERI collaborates, including opportunities for a long-term visit during the Ph.D. timeframe.

The application must be send by Jun 30th, 2010 to Dr. Alexandre Passant in either (X)HTML, pdf or plain text and must contain the following:

a CV

a one page statement explaining the candidate's interest in and compatibility with the objectives of the position

a list of (minimum two) referees

additionally, publications, software and other artifacts that the student may be consider relevant - ideally as links to resources available online