[DL] PhD Positions in Data and Knowledge Management at FBK-irst, Trento, Italy)

[Chiara Ghidini]

       		  [[[ Apologies for multiple copies of this message ]]]
                                                         
		  	    Three PhD Positions Available

		    Data and Knowledge Management Unit
                    	  Fondazione Bruno Kessler - IRST                        
                       			    Trento, Italy                             
        
	        Deadline:  March 16th, 2011, 13:00 (GTM+1)

The Data and Knowledge Management (DKM) research unit (http://dkm.fbk.eu) of the Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK), Trento, Italy, is seeking candidates for 3 Ph.D positions.

The Ph.D. studies will be held at the International Doctorate School in Information and Communication Technologies (http://www.ict.unitn.it/) of the University of Trento, Italy.

The research activities will focus on following topics: 

COMBINING ONTOLOGICAL AND PROCESS-BASED REASONING 

[This position is jointly supervised by FBK and the ISTC-CNR, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, Trento.] 

   Semantic Business Process Management has the main objective of
   improving the level of automation in the specification,
   implementation, execution, and monitoring of business processes by
   extending business process management tools with the most
   significant results from the area of Semantic Web. For instance,
   when the focus is on process modeling, i.e. the activity of
   specification of business processes at an abstract level,
   annotating process descriptions with labels taken from a set of
   domain ontologies can provide additional support to the phase of
   business analysis, or to the creation of valid process diagrams,
   which not only comply with the basic requirements of the process
   semantics, but also satisfy properties that take into account the
   domain specific semantics of the labels of the different process
   elements. The ability to provide good Semantic Business Process
   Management services poses strong scientific challenges as it
   requires an integrated usage of formalisms for the representation
   and execution of business processes together with those used to
   represent ontologies and business domains, which traditionally have
   been developed and investigated in separate research areas. The aim
   of this thesis is to investigate how we can combine logical
   formalisms for process and domain knowledge to enhance the quality
   of Semantic Business Process Management. The thesis will
   investigate (i) the definition of new theoretical paradigms as well
   as the extension of existing ones, (ii) the development of
   reasoning services on top of these theoretical paradigms and (iii)
   the tailoring these reasoning services to scenarios taken from
   Business Process Design and Service Provisioning, Integration and
   Composition.
  
   Skills required: good knowledge of logic and knowledge
   representation; reasonable knowledge of software engineering and
   conceptual modelling.

   Contact person: Chiara Ghidini
 
MIXING LOGICAL AND STATISTICAL REASONING
 
   Humans solve the problems of interpreting multimedia documentation
   by both exploiting structural regularities in the data, as well as
   making use of common sense and specialized knowledge that
   explicitly represents the meaning of data. In spite of this simple
   observation, current approaches to processing content over the
   Internet are based either on a statistical approach, which exploits
   the regularities of the content encoded in a statistical model
   (using machine learning methodologies), or, alternatively, by
   logical approaches, by exploiting logical knowledge encoded via
   logical theories (semantic web and ontologies). In both cases this
   unilateral approach leads to a limitation in the performance or in
   the quality of the results. We believe that combining statistical
   knowledge with logical knowledge in a unique system would improve
   the efficiency and the effectiveness of content management
   applications. The Copilosk project at FBK aims at investigating how
   statistical and logical knowledge can be combined and exploited in
   content and knowledge management, by proposing or extending a
   theoretical paradigm, test it in three use cases in the area of
   machine translation, knowledge extraction from text, and image
   object recognition, and in case of positive results applying it to
   a real case scenario. For more information about the copilosk
   project please visit copilosk web site The Ph.D will be developed
   in collaboration with Telecom Italia

   Contact person: Luciano Serafini

STRUCTURED DATA INDEXING AND RETRIEVAL 

   Topics of this grant are the
   ontological (i.e. formal) description and reasoning of knowledge
   according to standards developed by the Semantic Web community
   combined with machine learning approaches such as graphical models
   or regularization methods. Innovative research will be addressed
   for context-driven reasoning and indexing and will be jointly
   carried out with existing multimedia analysis (e.g. image
   recognition, speech analysis, etc.) in some augmented reality
   scenarios. This research will be developed in collaboration with 
   Telecom Italia. 

   Contact person: Luciano Serafini

Candidate Profile
=================

The ideal candidate should have an MS or equivalent degree in computer
science, mathematics or electronic engineering, phisics and philosophy, 
and combine solid theoretical background and software development skills.

The candidate should be able to work in a collaborative environment,
with a strong commitment to reaching research excellence and achieving
assigned objectives.

Applications and Inquiries
==========================

Interested candidates should inquire for further information and/or
apply by sending email to serafini<at>fbk.eu or ghidini<at>fbk.eu

Applications should contain a statement of interest, with a Curriculum
Vitae, and three reference persons. PDF format is strongly encouraged.

NOTE THAT AN APPLICATION THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF TRENTO WEBSITE IS REQUIRED.
See http://ict.unitn.it/application for more details.
THE DEADLINE FOR THE APPLICATION IS March 16th, 2011, 13:00 (GTM+1).