The research Unit for Semantic Web Reasoning and Querying at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) of the National University of Ireland, Galway invites applications for a PhD fellowship position. DERI a leading research institute in semantic technologies offers a stimulating, dynamic and multi-cultural research environment, excellent ties to research-groups worldwide and close collaboration with industrial partners. The DERI Unit for Reasoning and Querying focuses on improving the scalability and investigating the adequacy of traditional reasoning and query answering techniques for the Web, where several classical assumptions no longer hold as data is heterogeneous, distributed, possibly incomplete or contradictory, structured in different levels of granularity, varying in levels of trust and accessible only by following implicit or explicit security policies. Research is performed in collaboration with other DERI units and industrial partners. The PhD fellowship! is funded by Science Foundation Ireland and offers for the successful candidate an annual stipend, course fees and conference travel when presenting.
The Candidate
Applicants should:
- hold an excellent primary degree or Masters qualification in MsC in Computer Science or related discipline (technical informatics, etc.)
- have Programming experience, preferably in C++/Java and Prolog
- bring interests in algorithms, mathematical logics and formal reasoning
- show willingness to collaborate with others and work effectively as a member of a team
Desirable:
- Preliminary experience to give technical presentations and prepare reports/papers for publication
- Preliminary publication history or proof of previous work (student conference presentation, etc)
- Ability to work, research and learn independently
- Industrial project experience being a distinct advantage.
Topic
The main idea of the Semantic Web is (1) to attach meta-information to web resources and (2) to do formal reasoning on this meta-information. The World Wide Web Consortium defines several languages to represent (RDF/OWL/OWL2) and query (SPARQL) such information. However, querying and reasoning on web-scale requires non-traditional techniques. Our aim is to have a scalable framework for the execution of queries written in the SPARQL language over large OWL knowledge bases. One promising idea is to transform SPARQL [1] and the problem of querying OWL data into the Logic Programming domain [2] where research on parallelisation and distributed execution has been carried out for more than 20 years. The work shall also involve incorporating research results into prototypes successfully deployed on the Web such as the YARS2 [3] federated SPARQL engine within the Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE) project.
Application
Please submit your application (including cover letter outlining suitability, a brief outline of your preferred methodology, full CV and contact details for three referees) to hr.ie@deri.org with the subject line 'PhD Fellowship in Distributed Large Scale Reasoning over Semantic Web data', by 5 pm on Friday, July 10th, 2009.
More information:
http://urq.deri.ie
http://www.deri.ie
http://www.deri.ie/about/jobs/#phd_sw
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