PhD studentship in Social Semantics at KMi, OU, UK

  Full-time PhD studentship in Social Semantics

http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=5359

Knowledge Media Institute, Based in Milton Keynes, UK.

Three-year PhD studentship

circulation date : 07/10/2010

closing date : 08/11/2010



The PhD studentship will provide a tax-free stipend of £13,590 
(increases on an annual basis) and covers all fees, and is available to 
any suitably qualified UK, EU and International students.

Start Date: January 2011 (or later by agreement).

The explosive growth of online communities continues in all areas of 
society, and their use is now widespread in social, business, scientific 
and public service domains, enabling community members to collaborate 
through shared ideas, knowledge and opinion. Online communities now 
generate major economic value to business and can form pivotal parts of 
corporate expertise management, corporate marketing, product support, 
customer relationship management, product innovation and targeted 
advertising.

However, the micro and macro dynamics of online communities in terms of 
structure, information, behaviour and economics are not well understood. 
There is a real need for far better real-time tracking of individuals, 
sub-communities, interests, and behaviours, all supported by in-depth 
analytics and a framework for automated, speedy generation of rich user 
profiles.

This PhD project will focus on designing and developing tools to monitor 
and process users’ activities in online communities to identify and 
evaluate their interests and behaviour over time, using a combination of 
syntactical, statistical, and semantic analysis techniques. Semantic 
technologies will be used to model, structure, integrate, and process 
user profiles.

This studentship is funded by both the Open University and an EU project 
that involves several academic and industrial partners from various 
European countries. The aim of this project is to design and develop a 
platform for real-time monitoring and analysis of business online 
communities.

Academic Requirements: You should have a first or upper second-class 
honours undergraduate degree or a relevant Masters Degree or equivalent 
experience in a relevant computer science discipline. Knowledge of 
semantic web technologies is a clear advantage.

For informal enquiries: Contact Dr Harith Alani (email: h dot alani at 
open dot ac dot uk, tel.: +44 (0)1908 659399).

Application deadline: 8 November 2010

Interviews: week commencing 22 November 2010

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Received on Saturday, 9 October 2010 10:14:20 UTC