2 PhD vacancies in interactive access to heterogeneous user contributed media at CWI, Amsterdam

The Interactive Information Access group of CWI has 2 vacancies for *PhD 
students,*
in interactive access to heterogeneous user contributed media.

Each candidate is expected to carry out research in the field of public 
Web data. The European broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg and Dutch 
cultural heritage institutes such as the Rijksmuseum, Naturalis, Beeld 
en Geluid and the Royal Library provide the general public with more and 
more opportunities to interact with their collections online. The 
user-generated content (UGC) and metadata that results from these 
interactions enriches the collections, and is considered of high 
potential value. In parallel, advances in computer vision allow 
automatic analysis of audio-visual content on a large scale, also 
resulting in potentially valuable enrichment. Both types of enrichment 
share the characteristic that their quality can differ from extremely 
useful to totally useless, or even harmful.

In the context of these projects we are interested in how the use of 
such content affects the design of applications, especially for research 
tasks in which the quality of the data is important, and where the user 
contributed media metadata and video-analysis results are used in 
combination with professionally curated data. Example research questions 
include:

·How should we support researchers in selecting data subsets of 
sufficient quality for their study?

·How can we unobtrusively convey the availability of potential 
enrichments, such as hyperlink interactions in streaming video, or the 
provenance of data from different sources?


The research will be carried out in the context of the EU FP7 project 
LinkedTV and the Dutch COMMIT (http://www.commit-nl.nl/) program and 
will lead to the publication of a PhD thesis within 4 years.


Candidates are required to have a master degree in computer science and 
have affinity with HCI and/or IR-related research. Candidates are 
expected to have an excellent command of English, and good academic 
writing and presentation skills.


Further information can be found at http://www.cwi.nl/jobs/phd-students