[PragmaticWeb] Six pre-doctoral fellowships (Edinburgh/Trento/Barcelona/Madrid)

[Marco Schorlemmer]

SIX PRE-DOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS (Edinburgh/Trento/Barcelona/Madrid) 


The ESSENCE (Evolution of Shared SEmaNtics in Computational Environments, www.essence-network.eu) Marie Curie Initial Training Network is offering six Early-Stage Researcher (pre-doctoral) positions, to start in September 2014.The application deadline for these posts is 24th April 2014.

This is a rare opportunity to be involved in a highly prestigious European training network for outstanding applicants in an emergent and important research area, led by internationally leading groups in their fields!

ESSENCE conducts research and provides research training in various aspects of translating human capabilities for negotiating meaning to open computational environments such as the web, multi-robot systems, and sensor networks. The network will support 15 pre- and post-doctoral fellows who will work toward a set of different research projects within this overall theme, ranging from symbol grounding and ontological reasoning to game-theoretic models of communication and crowdsourcing.

ESSENCE involves a top-quality consortium of internationally leading research institutions which will act as hosts for the following projects in the current recruitment round:

Early-Stage Researchers (36 months):
- Dynamic, focussed data matching (School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, UK)
- A collaborative platform for domain knowledge construction (Information Engineering and Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Trento, Italy)
- An entity-centric crowdsourcing pipeline for large-scale up-to-date high quality knowledge (Information Engineering and Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Trento, Italy)
- Concept Convergence: Argumentation and Agreement on Meaning (IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona, Spain)
- Advanced interaction-situated semantic alignment (IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona, Spain)
- Robust communication and alignment of concept extensions (playence, Madrid, Spain)

Early-Stage Researchers must, at the time of recruitment by the host organisation be in the first 4 years (full-time equivalent research experience) of their research careers, and not yet have a doctoral degree. Research experience is measured from the date when they obtained the degree which formally entitled them to embark on a doctorate.

All positions are very competitively remunerated (significantly above the respective average national salaries/studentships) and aimed at outstanding candidates. Please consult the individual descriptions of projects at http://www.essence-network.eu/hiring for detailed salary information.

Researchers can be of any nationality, though at the time of recruitment by the host organisation, researchers must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc) in the country of their host organisation for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to the reference date. (Short stays such as holidays and/or compulsory national service are not taken into account.)

The ESSENCE network aims to attract 40% females among the recruited researchers. Female applicants are explicitly encouraged to apply and treated preferentially whenever they are equally qualified as other male candidates. The ESSENCE network will encourage flexible working hours at each host institution and/or the opportunity to work part-time from home if necessary. ESSENCE will provide specific support for female researchers in terms of targeted training events and dedicated mentoring.

All applicants are asked to pre-apply at http://www.essence-network.eu/hiring. Please contact Dr Michael Rovatsos (mrovatso at inf.ed.ac.uk) for informal enquiries.