Open PhD Research Position – Tools for Cooperation and Workplace Learning, University of Bochum

========================================================================= Open PhD Research Position – Tools for Cooperation and Workplace Learning =========================================================================

At the Chair for Information and Technology Management, Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany, we offer a position for a Researcher / PhD Candidate in Fulltime, starting January / February 2014 in the EU funded project EmployID (up to 4 years run time)

More information and downloads for the position can be found at
http://www.imtm-iaw.rub.de/?p=2906

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Information and Technology Management (IMTM) at the Institute for Applied Work Science of the Ruhr University of Bochum is one of the leading groups in the design and analysis of socio-technical systems with a focus on areas such as HCI, CSCW / Groupware and CSCL / Learning at Work. We analyse individual and collaborative work and explore new methods, concepts and IT tools to support and improve this work.

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In the EU funded research project EmployID (http://employid.eu/), which will begin in February 2014, IMTM is responsible for developing a set of combinable methods and IT tools to support reflection and e-Coaching at work in personal employment services (job agencies) in different European countries. For our project team we are looking for a new colleague to deal with the design, development and evaluation of such tools in individual and collaborative work.
The candidate should have graduated in computer science or other studies related to the position (preferably no longer than one year ago) and should be motivated to write a PhD thesis on a topic of the project.

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Work assignments
** Analysis (e.g., interviews, ethnography) of constraints and requirements
** Development and exploration of IT tools to support reflection and coaching at work
** Introduction and integration of IT tools in work processes and existing (IT) infrastructures
** Work on scientific questions on tool support for reflection and coaching at work

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Requirements for the candidate
** Graduation in computer science or other studies fitting the tasks of the project (grade 'good' or better)
** Knowledge in programming of web applications (e.g., JavaScript, Java and application servers) and/or mobile applications (e.g., Android or iOS)
** Basic experiences (e.g., by working projects or in final thesis) in areas such as learning at work, reflection support, e-learning, cooperative systems, knowledge management, web 2.0 or similar
** Basic experience in using empirical methods (e.g., interviews, observation, focus groups)
** Interest in scientific work, especially in publishing project results in conferences and journals
** Motivation to create a PhD thesis on topics of the project
** English fluently, written and spoken
** Willingness to travel

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Favourable additional experiences
** In-depth knowledge in empirical methods (qualitative and/or quantitative) and/or evaluation of IT systems
** Experience in e-coaching, creativity support or other areas relevant for the project tasks
** Experience in socio-technical and/or interaction design

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Funding and Benefits
** The position is fully funded (German TV-L E13)
** Possibility to work and gather experiences in a European project with international partners from science and business (partners from Austria, Germany, Spain, Slovenia, UK)
** Writing a PhD thesis on a topic of the project
** Self-regulated and sole responsible work in a collaborative work environment
** Integration in a scientific work group and network

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Information and Contact
Dr.-Ing. Michael Prilla
Institut für Informations- und Technikmanagement Ruhr-Universität Bochum - NB 1/67 http://www.imtm-iaw.rub.de
+49 234 32 27735

Please send your application including your CV (tabular), brief letter of motivation and an example of your writing (e.g., published articles or parts of final thesis) no later than 28th of November via eMail to:
michael.prilla@rub.de

We at the Ruhr-University try to foster careers of female scientists where they are under-represented and encourage all women to apply. Applications of suitable candidates with disabilities are welcome as well.

Date of job offering: 14th October 2013

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Post-Doctoral Research Position at IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona

POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH POSITION AT IIIA-CSIC, BARCELONA

The Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC) will offer a 2.5-year post-doctoral research position to work on COINVENT, a high-profile international research project to be funded under the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme.

The IIIA-CSIC belongs to the Spanish National Research Council, Spain's largest public institution devoted to research and technological development. The IIIA-CSIC is a leading research centre in Europe in the areas of multiagent systems, machine learning, and uncertainty reasoning. It attracts funding from the European, Spanish, and Catalan governments and has substantial collaborative research projects with industry.

The COINVENT project, led by Dr. Marco Schorlemmer and Prof. Enric Plaza, aims at advancing in the formal understanding of creativity by developing a computationally feasible, cognitively-inspired formal model of concept invention, drawing from interdisciplinary research results from cognitive science, artificial intelligence, formal methods and computational creativity, and validating it for mathematical reasoning and melodic harmonisation. For more details pleas visit http://www.iiia.csic.es/coinvent/.

REQUIREMENTS:
- doctoral degree in computer science or related fields
- programming skills and the ability to demonstrate a knowledge of techniques in artificial intelligence, particularly in computational logic, formal methods, knowledge representation and reasoning
- excellent oral and written skills in English, including writing reports and academic publications
- the ability to work independently or as part of a team with academic and commercial partners to achieve goals within tight time constraints
- the ability to demonstrate enthusiasm about state-of-the-art research, development and technology transfer

SALARY:
39.229,96€ per annum, payed in 14 instalments (2.802,14€ per month).

START DATE:
1st January 2014 at earliest. It may be possible to start later than this depending on the candidates' circumstances.

APPLICATION:
Please fill out the web application form (http://www.iiia.csic.es/coinvent/application/form/) with
- your personal data,
- a short statement, in English, of why you are interested in joining the COINVENT project at IIIA-CSIC,
- name and contact information of one or two persons who are willing to provide confidential references, and
- your complete CV in PDF format.


CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATION: 15th September 2013.

For further information please contact Dr. Marco Schorlemmer (marco@iiia.csic.es).

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Final Tellnet event at Media & Learning 2012 Conference in Brussels

Teachers' Lifelong Learning Network

www.tellnet.eun.org

Final Tellnet event at Media & Learning 2012 Conference in Brussels

Social media networks in schools and in teacher's lives

How teachers can use social networks to support their professional development? The final TeLLNet workshop will take place on 14 November at the Media & Learning Conference in Brussels, focusing on the importance of professional development networks for teachers' lives.

Participants in this workshop will be able to familiarise with the basics of Social Network Analysis in the context of eTwinning, the community for school in Europe, and will learn about concepts such as network structure and social capital. A prospective scenario-building exercise called "Teachers' profession and teacher collaboration networks in 2025" will offer a number of recommendations to policy makers and educational stakeholders.

A booklet with final results from the project will also be released. The booklet will additionally include a set of possible future scenarios of teachers' profession in compulsory education in 2025. The booklet is targeted to educational policy-makers in Europe. It's aim is to help discuss plausible futures of teachers' profession and collaboration networks through the use of fictional scenarios.

About TeLLNet

 The TeLLNet project is to study the eTwinning network (currently over 170 000 teachers) through visualisation techniques, Social Network Analysis (SNA) and prospective scenario building exercises. Using these techniques, the goals is to identify the main structures, actors, networks and Communities of Practice that are effective in sharing practices, encouraging innovation and creativity at schools. The project is co-funded by the European Commission's Lifelong Learning Programme.

The project partners are:

European Schoolnet, Knowledge Team, WP1, 5, 6, 7

RWTH Aachen University, Informatic 5 (Information Systems & Databases), WP2

OUNL, Celstec, Learning Networks for professionals, WP3

IPTS-JRC, Institute of Prospective Technology Studies, WP4

 

www.tellnet.eun.org

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Open PostDoc and PhD Position on Web Data Integration at the University of Mannheim, Germany

The Focus Area Web-based Systems (Prof. Christian Bizer) within the Research
Group Data and Web Science at the University of Mannheim is seeking to fill
two full-time positions:
1. PostDoc Researcher – EU Project LOD2
2.Graduate Research Associate / PhD Student – EU Project LOD2


PostDoc Researcher – EU Project LOD2

The researcher is expected to carry out research on Web Data Integration
(Schema Matching, Identity Resolution, Data Quality Assessment and Fusion)
as well as Large-Scale Data Extraction in the context of the EU research
project LOD2. The results of the research work should contribute to the
further development of the LDIF – Linked Data Integration Framework,
WebDataCommons and DBpedia and be integrated into the LOD2 Technology Stack.
The future holder of this position should have a proven academic record in
one or several of the following areas:
• Data Integration
• Data Mining
• Linked Data and Semantic Web Technologies We expect candidates to have a
PhD degree in computer science or a related discipline, have good
programming skills (Java or Scala) and be fluent in English. Experience with
large-scale data processing techniques such as Hadoop is a plus. The
position should ideally be filled in November 2012 and is available until
the end of the LOD2 project in August 2014.


Graduate Research Associate / PhD Student – EU Project LOD2

The graduate research associate is expected to carry out research on Web
Data Integration (Schema Matching, Identity Resolution, Data Quality
Assessment and Fusion) as well as Large-Scale Data Extraction in the context
of the EU research project LOD2. The results of the research work should
contribute to the further development of the LDIF – Linked Data Integration
Framework, WebDataCommons and DBpedia and be integrated into the LOD2
Technology Stack. The graduate research associate is expected to work
towards a PhD degree on a topic connected with the project.
Experience in scientific work as well as knowledge in one or several of the
following areas are of advantage:

• Data Integration
• Data Mining
• Linked Data and Semantic Web Technologies
• Large-scale Data Processing Techniques such as Hadoop
We expect candidates to have a university degree in computer science or a
related discipline, have good programming skills (Java or Scala) and be
fluent in English. The position should ideally be filled in November 2012
and is available until the end of the LOD2 project in August 2014.


How to apply?

The University of Mannheim is an equal-opportunities employer. Preference
will be given to applicants with disabilities provided they have the same
qualifications. The University of Mannheim strives to increase the
proportion of women in research and teaching and we therefore encourage
qualified women to apply.
Please send your application together with the usual documents (curriculum
vitae, information about research and software development experience, list
of publications, copies of certificates) no later than 15th October 2012 as
PDF by email using a subject line starting with [LOD2 Application] to

Prof. Dr. Christian Bizer
Research Group Data and Web Science
Universität Mannheim
chris@informatik.uni-mannheim.de

Further information about the Research Group Data and Web Science is found
at
http://dws.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/

Further information about the LOD2 Project is found at
http://lod2.eu/

This job posting is also found at
http://dws.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/en/news/detail/news/2012/09/26/open-po
stdoc-and-phd-position-on-web-data-integration-in-the-eu-project-lod2/

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The European TEL Projects Community from a Social Network Analysis Perspective - Presentation at EC-TEL 2012

This is our first presentation for the the EC-TEL 2012 in Saarbrücken, Germany. Michael Derntl gave the presentation on Thursday, September 20 in the organizational learning session.

 

The European TEL Projects Community from a Social Network Analysis Perspective from Michael Derntl

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PhD candidate position at Stoneroos and Eindhoven University of Technology

JOB ANNOUNCEMENT
for combined PhD researcher position at Eindhoven University of Technology and Stoneroos BV.

We offer a 4-year full-time PhD research position in the field of Adaptive
Hypermedia and User Modeling at the department of Computer Science,
Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), the Netherlands.
The candidate will be enrolled in FP7 research project EURECA: Enabling
information re-Use by linking clinical REsearch and Care
(http://eurecaproject.eu/) that studies linkage of healthcare information
residing in electronic health record systems with information in clinical
research information systems, such as clinical trials.

The Dutch company Stoneroos BV (http://www.stoneroos.nl/en) is teaming up
with TU/e to contribute to the semantic interoperability and data mining
research aspects in this project in order to design a personalized
information source for patients (and patient groups). Stoneroos is an
innovative company, sprouted from the TV-domain, which focuses on products
like iTV applications, second screen apps, metadata enrichment, etc.,
bringing cutting-edge technologies like semantic Web technology in the area
of personalization to the real world, resulting e.g. in the iFanzy
personalized TV recommender system. TU/e has guided that research in the
past and has extensive experience in data mining and personalization.

RESEARCH PROJECT AND TASK DESCRIPTION
In the EURECA project 18 partners from 8 countries work together to offer
better information to both patients and specialists, using many ICT
techniques such as information system architecture, semantic
interoperability, data mining and knowledge discovery.

The successful candidate will focus on a set of tasks aiming to integrate
state-of-the-art and yet to be invented techniques in personalization, user
modeling, semantic interoperability and data-driven intelligence for
developing personalized/adaptive information services for different groups
of patients and medical professionals.
It is expected that the PhD candidate will be involved in the complete R&D
cycles including theory/framework building, implementation of the software
prototypes, experimentation with real data and evaluations/user studies.

PROFILE
We are looking for highly motivated applicants with a Master degree in
Computer Science or other related disciplines. You are expected to have good
knowledge and at least some experience in one or more of the following
areas:
- Personalization and user modeling,
- Semantic interoperability,
- Data mining, recommender systems, information retrieval.
Successful candidates are expected to posses
- Good analytical and software development skills,
- Good command of spoken and written English,
- Good communication skills and willingness to collaborate with other
researchers and developers having diverse background,
- Experience with writing research papers and technical reports is a plus,
but not mandatory,
- Basic knowledge of medical informatics and clinical research is a plus,
but not mandatory.

CONDITION
Stoneroos is offering a position as researcher and software developer in the
EURECA project. The assignment involves a full-time position for 4 years.
The candidate is expected to prepare and defend a PhD at TU/e within these 4
years.

As researcher/developer you will be staying on average 3 to 4 days a week at
Stoneroos and 1 to 2 days at the TU/e for guidance in the PhD process and
further collaboration with the TU/e researchers, mainly prof. dr. Paul De
Bra, dr. Mykola Pechenizkiy and dr. George Fletcher.

You will also collaborate with researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
and Philips Research taking part in EURECA, and participate in the Dutch
national research school SIKS: School for Information and Knowledge Systems.

APPLICATION
Applications including CV, (link to) master thesis, motivation letter and 2
references for recommendation should be sent by email to
tue.stoneroos@gmail.com.

For more information about the job description, please send inquiries to the
same e-mail address (or one of the corresponding advisors).

The screening process will start immediately and continue until the position is filled.
Candidates must be available to start working in this position at the earliest possible date, but no later than December 1st, 2012.

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Research Grant for “Machinima Storyteller” - Two Positions Available in Lisbon

Research Grant for "Machinima Storyteller"

INESC-ID - www.inesc-id.pt

Two Positions Available

Application Deadline: 15/5/2012

Contact: rui.prada@ist.utl.pt

Description

Machinima Storyteller is a bilateral project between GAIPS, INESC-ID Lisbon (http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/) and BeActive (http://www.beactivemedia.com/) that aims at the development of tools to support the creation of Machinima (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima) with the Unity3D (http://unity3d.com/) game engine.

The project will go beyond Machinima by allowing characters to be played by virtual actors (implemented as autonomous agents) and by allowing users to play the story through one of the characters as an interactive storytelling game.

The platform to be developed will include tasks for different roles in film/game making. It will allow:

—  a "Scriptwriter" to create the script for the characters

—  an "Art director" to setup scenarios and characters wardrobe

—  a "Director" to direct the characters, work on the camera and lightning

—  a "Game designer" to add gameplay elements to the story (e.g. turn the film into an adventure game)

Figure 1 summarizes the concept and architecture of the platform. It includes: an Asset Manager to organize the art assets that represent the props and characters, an Editor that enables the user to define and configure scenes based on a script, a Player that allow the user to see the performance and manage the camera to record a video and a Game Creator to allow the user to add gameplay element to the story. The script and final video editing will be produced in external tools (e.g. Final Draft and Premiere).

 

Figure 1 – Machinima Storyteller Concept and Architecure.

The grant holder will be involved in the development of one (or more) of the following tasks:

—  Develop autonomous agents that play as virtual actors and follow a script with concurrent/simultaneous/ordered actions.

—  Add the ability to the virtual actors to improvise while there is no action scripted and, also, to react to the other actors' improvisation actions.

—  Add the ability to the virtual actors to understand the suggestions/orders of a director (human) and adapt their performance accordingly.

—  Develop the Asset Manager tool

—  Develop the Machinima Editor tool

—  Develop the Machinima Player tool

—  Develop the Game Creator tool

There is an opportunity to define a PhD proposal based on the work developed in this project.

The activity will be supervised by Professor Rui Prada project leading Researcher at INESC-ID.

The grant holder will be integrated at INESC-ID in the Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Characters Group (GAIPS).

Salary

Two Research Grants - Bolsa de Investigação para Mestre (BI-M) - are now available for the duration of 12 months renewed in the end if both parties agree. The salary will be 980€ / month tax free with the addition of accident insurance and social security contributions according to the FCT "Regulations for Advanced Training and Qualification of Human Resources" and INESC-ID Lisbon grant regulations.

Requirements

Candidates are expected to have an MSc degree in computer science, electrical engineering or related area, with experience in one (or more) of the following areas:

1. Programing with Unity3D
2. Developing Autonomous Agents
3. Interactive Storytelling
4. User Centred-Design
5. Game Design

Application

Applications must be sent to Rui Prada (rui.prada@ist.utl.pt) and include a detailed CV, a brief statement about research interests and motivation to join the project.

The selection of candidates will be based on academic record, interest for multidisciplinary areas of research related to the project and possible publications and experience in the area of intelligent agents and interactive applications' design. English language level will also be considered as criteria.

The applications' deadline is 15/05/2012.

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