Two Fully Funded Doctoral Studentships in Artifical Intelligence/Web Data Extraction

The Information Systems Research Group is offering two fully funded D.Phil studentships in Oxford University's Computing Laboratory.  These positions are associated with the ERC project  "DIADEM: Domain-centric Intelligent Automated Data Extraction Methodology", under the supervision of Professor Georg Gottlob. The goal of this project is the development of methods and systems for automatically extracting highly structured relevant  information for domain-specific Websites, such as, for example, sites of real-estate agents, (see http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/files/2541/DIADEM_information.pdf for a non-technical description). The project covers a wide range of research areas including the following: logical and algorithmic fundamentals of data extraction, design and study of new (logic-) programming languages, knowledge representation, machine learning, domain ontology design, semi-structured data, description logics, ontological reasoning, web site analysis, natural language processing, software engineering, and cloud computing. We plan to implement two prototypes for testing the new methods to be developed in the context this project in two different application domains.

The studentships are fully funded (at EU fees level - overseas candidates will need supplementary funding) for 3 ½ years from 1^st October 2010. Students admitted with a later start date (but not later than April 1^st 2011) will receive a guarantee of 3 years funding.  Each studentship includes a stipend of at least £13290 per year as well as provision for travel to conferences.

Candidates must satisfy the usual requirements:

 http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/admissions/dphil/dphil-criteria.pdf

for studying for a doctorate at Oxford. In addition, the students should be skilled in theoretical computer science and in some of the above-mentioned areas and must have good writing, communication, presentation, and organization skills Good programming and systems-building skills count as additional qualification, given that, based on the theoretical results of this project,  prototype software systems for domain-specific web data extraction  will be built. 

The closing date for applications has been extended to 30th April 2010.