Second PhD Research Position at Sina Institute, Birzeit University

Within the framework of the SIERA project, an FP7 European project, Sina Institute For Knowledge and Arabic Technologies, at Birzeit University, is seeking a highly qualified candidates for the following the PhD research position.
Position Title: PhD Researcher
Project Website: http://sina.birzeit.edu/SIERA
Institute Website: http://sina.birzeit.edu
To Apply: https://ritaj.birzeit.edu/ecareers/one-job?job_id=...
Application Deadline: April 15, 2013
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Competency Requirement:
Master Degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science or other related fields.
Advanced knowledge and practical skills on database, XML, and object-oriented, and web programming. Knowledge about ontology engineering, lexical semantics, Arabic language processing, data mining, and/or machine learning is a pounce.
Ability and high motivation to conduct research.
Experience in writing quality scientific articles.
Ability (and preferably experience) in writing completive R&D proposals.
Fluency in written and spoken English.
Excellent written and oral communication and leadership skills.
Excellent skills in writing press releases and web content, in Arabic and English.
Ability to travel
High motivation and readiness to conduct a PhD research in topics related to Ontology Engineering, Lexical semantics, and Arabic NLP.
Duties:
- Conducting research in the area of Lexical Semantics and multilingual knowledge Sharing, which includes developing algorithms, programming, conducting experiments, and writing articles.
- Help in administration and financial management of R&D projects.
- Help in writing R&D proposals.
- Coordinate and organize scientific events and conferences.
- Teach basic and advanced courses to undergraduate students.
- Write press releases and develop web sites, when needed.
- Any other R&D task in the institute, when needed.
In turn, we offer:
- Competitive salary.
- Unique research environment with state-of-art infrastructure.
- Interesting research topics related to the area of Arabic technologies, e-governance, and Semantic Web
- Excellent ties to research groups worldwide.
- Possibility to work in and lead international research projects.
Successful applicants will work full-time on SIERA Project, and will be selected to conduct PhD research in one of the project’s related research fields. Selected students will conduct their PhD at Sina Institute, and being officially registered in prestige EU Universities (one of SIERA Project Partners). That is, PhD students will be co-supervised by both EU and Palestinian scientists, and their research topics will be the same or very close to their project duties. Students are expected to spend about 3 months a year with their EU co-supervisors and the rest of their time at Sina Institute.
The project’s aim is to reinforce closer and sustainable scientific cooperation between Palestinian and EU scientists in the field of multilingual and multicultural knowledge sharing technologies. The diversity of languages, cultures, and standards are the main barriers to sharing and consuming knowledge. All project activates are focused around establishing new research in this field. Two EU multilingual knowledge sharing portals have been selected as a concrete test-bed for the targeted research. The first, MICHAEL, is a cultural heritage portal which provides a multilingual service to explore digital collections from museums, archives, libraries and other cultural institutions from across Europe. The second, KYOTO, is a wiki-portal about environment and ecology. The key idea is to use both portals to investigate how to enable large-scale knowledge sharing portals with Arabic language and content. In doing this, a digitalized repository of Palestinian Cultural Heritage and another repository in the environment domain will be provided and added to the knowledge sharing portals.