Job CWI (National Research Center for Mathematics and Computer Science) - PhD student - Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Project

CWI has a vacancy for a 4-year PhD position in the Interactive Information Access research group for a FP7-project financed by the European Union: Fish4Knowledge.

Supporting humans in knowledge gathering and question answering w.r.t. marine and environmental monitoring through analysis of multiple video streams.

The study of marine ecosystems is extremely difficult because undersea video data is tedious to analyze as this is mainly done by hand or with hand-crafted computational tools.

Fish4Knowledge will allow a major increase in the ability to analize this data:
1) Video analysis will automatically extract information about the observed marine animals which is recorded in an observation database.
2) Interfaces will be designed to allow researchers to formulate and answer higher level questions over that database.

The project will be carried out in close cooperation with partners in Taiwan, Scotland and Italy.

PhD Student

The candidate is expected to carry out research in the field of user interfaces for interactive information retrieval and will analyze the information needs of marine biologists studying large amount of undersea video data, and translate these user needs into innovative interface designs that effectively support biologists in their tasks. These designs will need to take into account the state of the art in video analysis, being developed by other partners, and be empirically evaluated. Investigating where these designs are also applicable to data sources from other domains is also part of the research. Results are to be published in international journals and major conferences and in lead to a PhD thesis within 4 years.

Candidates are expected to have a Master's in computer science and have affinity with HCI and/or IR-related research. One should have good academic writing and presentation skills. Candidates are expected have an excellent command of English.

The terms of employment are in accordance with the Dutch "CAO-onderzoeksinstellingen". Moreover CWI offers attractive working conditions, including flexibility and help with housing for foreigners.

PhD Student

The gross monthly salary (on a full time basis) will be € 2.037 during the first year and will reach € 2.610 during the fourth year.

For more information, please visit the following website.

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), founded in 1946, is the national research institute for mathematics and computer science of the Netherlands. With over 160 researchers originating from more than 25 countries, CWI is an internationally focused organization where both Dutch and English are spoken. Our research is cutting edge, fundamental and socially relevant. We work together with other research institutes and industry. Approximately twenty spin-off companies have emerged out of CWI. We are located at the Science Park Amsterdam and are part of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

CWI maintains excellent relations with industry and the academic world, both in the Netherlands as well as abroad. After their research careers at CWI, an increasing number of young staff members find employment in these sectors, for example in spin-off companies that are based on research results from CWI. Of course, library and computing facilities are first-rate. CWI's non-scientific services to its personnel include career planning, training and courses, assistance in finding housing, and tailor-made solutions to problems that may occasionally arise.

While people have access to huge amounts of information, they typically need only a very limited subset of it to carry out their current task. In addition, with the introduction of data repositories with potentially expandable schema (for example those available in knowledge repositories on the Semantic Web), the core challenge is to find and present relevant subsets of these for a particular end user. Our goal is to support human users in obtaining the correct information, in the appropriate amount, relevant to the task at hand and presented in the appropriate way. This should minimise the cognitive overhead of the user, thus contributing to minimising the time for a user to complete her task.

Our aim is to develop methods to explore and confirm appropriate models of storage, selection, organisation and presentation of information to the user.

Our methods are based on developing solutions for linking descriptive semantics with the media assets that contain the information interpretable by the end user. Tools include Semantic Web knowledge description languages and associated tools. In parallel, empirical studies are used to understand the needs of users with their specific information needs. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations are carried out. Our current emphasis is on expert access to cultural heritage information owned by museums (MultimediaN Eculture project) and on end-user access to news content owned by news providers (NewsML work carried out in the context of K-Space).

Research history
CWI's semantic media interfaces group has been involved with the development of models and authoring systems for multimedia and hypermedia since the early 1990's. Results of this work include the Amsterdam Hypermedia Model, contributions to the W3C SMIL 1.0, SMIL 2.0, and XHTML recommendations, the hypermedia authoring system GRiNS, the CWI spin-off company Oratrix. More recent work resulted in the development of the multimedia transformation engine Cuypers and the rhetorial video documentary engine Vox Populi.

Members of the group have been active in W3C's Synchronized Multimedia Working Group, ISO's MPEG7 DDL Working Group and W3C's Multimedia Semantics Incubator Group.

Additional information can be obtained from Dr. Jacco van Ossenbruggen, email Jacco.van.Ossenbruggen@cwi.nl, telephone +31 (0)31-20-592 4141