Open position: PhD student in EU projects PeerAssist and PlanetData

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*PhD student in EU projects PeerAssist and PlanetData *

The *Semantic Technology Institute (STI) Innsbruck* 
(*http://www.sti-innsbruck.at* <http://www.sti-innsbruck.at/>), formerly 
known as *DERI Innsbruck*, was founded in 2002 and has developed into a 
challenging and dynamic research institute of approximately 40 people. 
*STI Innsbruck* collaborates with an international network of institutes 
in Asia, Europe and the USA, as well as with global industrial partners.

Our major objective is to establish Semantic technologies as a core 
pillar of modern Computer Science, thereby providing interoperability 
and scalability for Semantically Enabled Service Orientated Architectures.

STI Innsbruck is currently seeking candidates for the position of a PhD 
student.

*We offer:*

    * The stimulating environment of a leading research institute in the
      fields of Semantic Web, Semantic Web Services, Service-Oriented
      Architectures and formal languages and reasoning.
    * Long-term collaboration to well-known academic institutions and
      major companies around the world.
    * A multicultural working place with state-of-the-art infrastructure
      and resources including funding for attending international
      conferences, PhD symposia, summer schools, etc.

* We expect:*

    * A strong background in Computer Science or Information
      Technologies and focused research interest and expertise in at
      least one of the following areas: knowledge representation,
      ontology engineering, semantic technologies, social networks and
      web communities research, mobile and RFID-enabled services,
      information retrieval methods, reasoning, formal languages, data
      mining, visualization techniques, human-computer interaction.
    * A formal degree and interest required for pursuing a PhD at the
      University of Innsbruck.
    * Interest in working for the EU projects PeerAssist and PlanetData.

The main objectives of the *PeerAssist* project are the 
conceptualization, design, implementation and demonstration of a 
flexible Peer-to-Peer (P2P) platform, which will allow elderly people 
(not necessarily familiar with ICT technologies) to build virtual 
communities dynamically based on interests and needs they share.* *The 
PeerAssist platform will facilitate establishing on demand ad-hoc 
communities with friends, family,* *neighbors, caregivers, facilitators, 
care providers, etc., based on shared interests and communication needs. 
The community* *building and the P2P interaction will be achieved using 
information extracted from peer roles, profiles and user modeling,* 
*context that describes the overall user environment, and the specific 
request initiated, or service provided, by a peer, all of* *which are 
represented semantically in a machine understandable form.

*PlanetData* (*http://www.planet-data.eu* <http://www.planet-data.eu/>) 
is an EU Network of Excellence coordinated by STI Innsbruck. Its main 
aim is to establish an interdisciplinary, sustainable European community 
of researchers, helping organizations to expose their data on the Web in 
a useful way. PlanetData will push forward the state-of-the-art in 
large-scale data management and its application to the creation of 
useful, open data sets.

* *

The projects' consortia are interdisciplinary team of engineers and 
researchers in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Web Science and 
Knowledge Management from all over Europe of industrial and academic 
organizations. The contribution of STI Innsbruck is on semantic 
technologies for context-aware knowledge representation, capturing and 
processing of the information arriving from sensors, as well as on the 
design, prototyping and end-user evaluation of novel mobile and 
augmented reality services that comprise information about the 
communities and social networks. As part of the projects, the candidate 
will be also involved in community building, workshop and symposium 
organization, contributing to roadmaps and white papers, as well as 
supporting the provision of semantic and service infrastructures to the 
wider research community.

The projects will run for 24 (PeerAssist) and 48 (PlanetData) months, 
while starting in September-October 2010.

We kindly invite you to submit your application to *hr@sti2.at* 
<javascript:linkTo_UnCryptMailto('lzhksn9gqZrsh1-zs');>. Please include 
a current resume, a list of publications (if applicable), and digital 
versions of your most relevant works (such as graduation thesis or 
latest publications).

In case of further questions regarding this position please contact Dr. 
Anna Fensel (*anna.fensel@sti2.at* 
<javascript:linkTo_UnCryptMailto('lzhksn9zmmz-edmrdkZrsh1-zs');>).