Post-doc position at Lyon University

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Postdoctoral Position at the University of Lyon

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The University of Lyon and the INSA of Lyon announce a position
for a one year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Lyon.

Period :
12 months, beginning sept. 2001

Team :
Cognition & Experience Team (http://experience.univ-lyon1.fr/)

Lab :
LISI
Lyon 1 University (http://www.univ-lyon1.fr)

Place :
Lyon, France

Keywords :
Annotation, Document, Experience, Knowledge representation, RDF,
Semantic Indexing, Task, Usage

Description :

For several years, our research team has been involved in the
issue of helping people to find knowledge sources that could
be reused for his/her particular task. This question was firstly
tackled through research on the Case Based Reasoning paradigm
(CBR). CBR consists in finding in a case base former cases that
could be reused to solve new problems. Several projects have
issued from this research effort, such as PAD'IM and DESIGNER
[1,2], ACCELERE [3], which were about very precise contexts,
generally some very well known tasks. Later, this approach was
applied to the particular task of information retrieval (RADIX
project [4]) which demonstrated that the information retrieval
task is in fact mostly influenced by the task (generally unknown)
for which it is necessary to find this information. This is not
an original statement, and many researchers try to cope with it
building "user profiles" (which we think would gained being
called "usage profile"). Indeed the necessity for a general model
for information retrieval task has arisen, and it appeared it was
necessary to take into account the real user's task context.

We gave this orientation to our research effort along two projects,
toward a "usage indexing" for contents that can be accessed from
one's computer. In SESAME [5], we developed an annotation model
for audio-visual content description (Annotation Interconnected
Strata : AI-Strata). This approach is based on the principle
that annotating a document is in fact expressing the ongoing
exploitation task for this document (whichever that task can
be: edition, indexing, analysis, research). The approach is
basically not a rigid one, and also gives possibility to express
knowledge as in knowledge based systems and formal ontologies.
We set up an annotation graph expressing document description,
and consider that usage of the graph occurs in a contextual way
(as path expression from known nodes). Several tools have been
designed and are being developed allowing to exploit the graph.
Indeed, we do consider that useful experience (from document
exploitation) lies in the description graphs, and all that it
is necessary being able to exploit this experience through
dedicated user's tasks help ingassistants.

Our team is working upon these assumptions in the RECIS project
(INRIA / France Telecom / LISI [6]). Our goal is to design
efficient tools for users searching for audio-visual documents
on the basis of audio (signature descriptors), visual (images
and video signature descriptors) or semantic descriptions
(textual, semantic graph descriptors). Our contribution consists
in designing software assistants allowing the user to retrieve
audio-visual sequences on the base of descriptors graphs capable
on describing a "task signature". For instance, elaborating a
request graph in the context of information retrieval is very
similar to elaborating a description graph in an indexing task:
in any case, the purpose is to annotate "in context" what is
searched or indexed. The context is the context of the task
for which descriptors are being supposed making sense, and in
the framework of which they are supposed to have sense. This
context is expressed with task signatures (that can be abstract
or correspond to real descriptions).

Our team is committed to an effort of formalisation, generalisation,
and normalised representation of this approach, and we want to
associate a young, non French, researcher to this task for a one
year period. Beyond the RECIS project, other researchers of our
team will be associated to this effort, trying to apply it to other
issues (design assistance, learning assistance, etc.). Applicants
should have a PhD in Computer Science in the area of knowledge
representation, document indexing, information retrieval, content
and document structure description languages (XML, RDF, MPEG7).
Interests for linguistics, semiotics and interpretative systems
will be appreciated.

[1] Alain Mille, Jean Marc Chartres, Eric Niel, Béatrice Fuchs,
and Benoit Chiron (1995). Intelligent workstation for immediate
decision helping in process supervision. Computers and Chemical
Engineering, Vol 19, 1995, pages s815-s821, 1995.
[2] B. Fuchs, A. Mille, and B. Chiron (1995) Operator decision
aiding by adaptation of supervision strategies. In Lecture Notes
in Artificial Intelligence vol 1010, First International Conference
on Case-Based Reasoning, ICCBR'95, pages 23--32, Sesimbra,
Portugal, 1995. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany.
[3] Olivier Herbeaux and Alain Mille. (1998) Accelere: a case-based
design assistant for closed cell rubber industry. In R. Milne,
A. Mac Macintosh, and M. Bramer, editors, Proceedings of ES98,
the Eighteenth Annual International Conference of the British
Computer Society, Specialist Group on Expert Systems, pages 69--82.
BCS Conference Series, Springer-Verlag, London, 1998.
[4] Françoise Corvaisier, Alain Mille, and Jean Marie Pinon. (1997)
Information retrieval on the world wide web using a decision making
system. In RIAO 97, Montréal, Juin 1997, pages 284--295, 1997.
[5] Yannick Prié, Alain Mille et Jean-Marie Pinon (1999) A Context-
Based Audiovisual Representation Model for Audiovisual Information
Systems, Context'99, Second International and Interdisciplinary
Conference on Modeling and using Context, Trento, sept. 1999.
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1688, pp. 296-309.
[6] Elöd Egyed-Zsigmond, Yannick Prié, Alain Mille et Jean-Marie
Pinon (2000) A graph-based audiovisual document annotation and
browing system. RIAO'2000, Paris, apr. 2000, vol. 2, pp. 1381-1389.

Location information :
City of Lyon :  http://www.lyon-france.com/pages/en/
or http://www.mairie-lyon.fr/en/

Rhônes-Alpes Region :
http://www.cr-rhone-alpes.fr/uk/bouger/bdtour10.htm

Fee/month : 	~10,000 FRF - 1,524 EUR

Contact :

Alain Mille - Professor
amille@lisi.univ-lyon1.fr
http://bat710.univ-lyon1.fr/~amille/

Yannick Prié - Associate Professor
yprie@lisi.univ-lyon1.fr
http://lisi.insa-lyon.fr/~yprie/eng/index.html

Send curriculum + references to

Pr. Alain Mille
LISI - Bât Nautibus (710)
UFR Informatique
Université Claude Bernard
F-69622 Villeurbanne Cedex
FRANCE

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Received on Friday, 8 June 2001 12:39:00 UTC