AAA Data Science Postdoctoral researcher From Data to Semantics and Back Again

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (VU) & Faculty of Sciences (VU)

VU University Amsterdam is one of the leading institutions for higher education in Europe and aims to be inspiring, innovative, and committed to societal welfare. It compromises twelve faculties and has teaching facilities for 25.000 students.

The Faculty of Sciences performs research in the areas Life & Health, Networked World, Fundamentals of Science, and Energy & Sustainability. More than 1700 students participate in mono- and interdisciplinary bachelor and master courses. The staff is hosted in the departments of Physics, Chemistry & Pharmaceutical Sciences, Mathematics, and Computer Sciences. 

Amsterdam Data Science, an initiative of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), VU University Amsterdam (VU), Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA), and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is looking for 14 researchers at the postdoctoral/PhD level. These positions are funded by the Amsterdam Academic Alliance (AAA), a joint initiative of the UvA and VU aimed at intensifying collaboration with each other and knowledge institutions in the region, to cement Amsterdam's position as a hub of academic excellence. These positions are partially co-funded by CWI, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the UvA, HvA, ORTEC, Spinoza fund of Prof. Vossen, and VUmc.

Amsterdam Data Science provides a network in which some 300 Amsterdam based scientists exchange Data Science knowledge and forge partnerships within and outside the academic community. This comprises the foundations of data science and data science for the life sciences, social analytics, business analytics, and digital humanities.

This advertisement concerns one of the 14 positions. This postdoctoral researcher position is with Prof. Boncz of CWI, and with Prof. Bal and dr. Urbani of the Department of Computer Science of the VU University.

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science and linked to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The mission of CWI is to conduct pioneering research in mathematics and computer science, generating new knowledge in these fields and conveying it to trade, industry, and society at large.

Project description

This project is set towards a very ambitious goal: The automatic integration of large volumes of relational Web data into a single, and coherent database. Recently, this long-standing goal of database research became particularly important since an increasing number of data providers is releasing on the Web large datasets in a tabular form, such as collected in e.g. the CKAN repository. Unfortunately, these datasets are not interconnected, and often use different terminologies. These factors preclude an efficient usage of this publicly available data in many scenarios.

To this end, the postdoc is called to research methodologies to integrate large volumes of data into a coherent relational schema. Ideally, this integration should go through semantic annotations of the data in order to disambiguate and align its meaning.

The starting point of this work is a study on the applicability of current techniques to extract structured data (in the form of knowledge graphs) from unstructured sources. Then, the work should ideally re-utilize the experience accumulated during this task for the development of techniques that are more effective and that can be applied over very large amounts of data. Finally, new techniques are required to align the various knowledge graphs, in order to contribute to our ultimate goal of large-scale data integration of open Web data.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science or equivalent titles;
• excellent English writing and presentation skills (for residents outside the EER-area, a Toefl English language test might be required);
• familiarity with either techniques for entity recognition, natural language processing, semantic technologies, or large scale data management;
• excellent programming skills in either Java or C/C++ are a major plus.

Further information

For additional information please contact:

• Peter Boncz
  T: +31 (0)20592 4309 

• Jacopo Urbani
•  Henri Bal 
• Working at VU

Appointment

The appointment will be for a period of three years and divided over Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica and VU University Amsterdam. We have excellent employment conditions such as:

• remuneration of 8,3% end-of-year bonus and 8% holiday allowance;
• solid pension scheme (ABP);
• a minimum of 29 holidays In case of full-time employment;
• possibilities to save up holidays for sabbatical leave.

The salary will be in accordance with university regulations for academic personnel, and depending on experience, range from a minimum of €2,476 gross per month up to a maximum of €3,908 gross per month (salary scale 10) based on a full-time employment. The Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities is applicable.

Job application

Applications may only be submitted via informatica.secretariaat.few@vu.nl. To process your application immediately, please quote vacancy number 15107 and the title of the position you are applying for in the subject-line.

Applications must include a detailed curriculum vitae, BSc and MSc academic transcripts, a motivation letter explaining why you are the right candidate, list of projects you have worked on with brief descriptions of your contributions and the names and contact addresses of two academic references from which information about the candidate can be obtained. All these should be grouped in one PDF attachment.

Applications will be accepted until 10 May 2015.

No agencies please