Two Open Positions: Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Engineer

Two Open Positions: Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Engineer

Employer: Yahoo! Research (Barcelona) - Fundació Barcelona-Media

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Start date: January 1st, 2009

Duration: 3 years, full time.

 

Yahoo! Research Barcelona and Fundació Barcelona-Media are looking to hire a Postdoctoral Fellow and a Research Engineer. The persons employed for these positions will research, develop and implement new and innovative algorithms for search and navigation.

These tasks are motivated by LivingKnowledge, a new EU project in the Future and Emerging Technologies program. The project starts on February 1st 2009 and has a duration of three years. LivingKnowledge focuses on the diversity of knowledge, e.g., cultural backgrounds, schools of thought, or geographical contexts all drive different judgments, assessments, and opinions on the same facts. Time and evolution add a further dimension making diversity an intrinsic and unavoidable property of knowledge. The vision inspiring LivingKnowledge is to consider diversity an asset and make it traceable, understandable and exploitable, with the goal to improve navigation and search in very large multimodal datasets. Within LivingKnowledge, Yahoo! Research Barcelona (in a joint project with Fundació Barcelona-Media) is responsible for research and implementation of the search components, and for implementing one or several demonstrators.

The research and development work will focus on some of these aspects:

* Document representation, ranking functions and interaction models that incorporate diversity in several aspects, e.g., bias, opinions and the temporal dimension.

* Entity Retrieval and Browsing incorporating temporal aspects as well as aspects of opinion, consensus, etc.

* Novelty detection, opinion mining, bias detection.

* Efficient indexing and ranking algorithms for the above tasks.

The work will be developed under the supervision of Hugo Zaragoza and Ricardo Baeza-Yates, jointly at the Yahoo! Research (Barcelona) laboratory (http://research.yahoo.com/ <http://research.yahoo.com/>  <http://research.yahoo.com/ <http://research.yahoo.com/> > ) and the Fundació Barcelona-Media (http://www.barcelonamedia.org/ <http://www.barcelonamedia.org/>  <http://www.barcelonamedia.org/ <http://www.barcelonamedia.org/> > ).

 

Required Skills/Qualifications for the Postdoctoral position:

* Ph.D. in Computer Science.

* Strong research track record on computational linguistics, machine learning, and/or information retrieval. Candidates that have experience in sentence/entity/temporal retrieval, opinion mining, or novelty detection are preferred.

* Knowledge of the Spanish language is not required.

 

Required Skills/Qualifications for the Research Engineer:

* Degree in Computer Science.

* Strong programming skills.

* Knowledge of Web technologies: JavaScript, PHP, Tomcat, XML.

* Experience in Research & Development projects.

* Knowledge of the Spanish language is not required.

 

To apply, send your CV (indicating the names of three referees) to hugoz at yahoo-inc .com with the title "LivingKnowledge Application".