The Knowledge Media Institute is currently offering two fully-funded studentships commencing October 2017. Applications are invited from UK, EU and international students for full-time, 3-year study on the following PhD topics.
In particular, our research group is looking for PhD students to work on Big Data Analytics, under the supervision of Professor Enrico Motta.
We offer the following PhD topics.
Understanding and forecasting the spreading of research concepts.
The research will focus on the development of new algorithms which can automatically identify research concepts (e.g., technologies, approaches, theories, methods, models) in the literature and analyse how these concepts, which emerge in a particular research community (e.g., machine learning), are adopted by other communities (e.g., social science). The aim here is to be able to learn patterns of ‘research concept migration’, both to improve our understanding of the transmission of scientific ideas and also to enable the implementation of new systems able to alert researchers to potential interesting developments in other areas.
See the Rexplore project for our relevant previous work.
Exploratory search in large heterogenous data hubs.
Exploratory search solutions have so far primarily focused on supporting users in locating and making sense of information in large homogeneous repositories. With the emergence of large scale data portals, such as the MK Data Hub, the need has arisen for novel solutions effectively supporting users in exploring large heterogenous repositories, comprising thousands of different (but potentially related) data sets. This research will require the design and development of novel exploratory solutions, which will comprise not only new user interface paradigms but also novel intelligent data aggregation and abstraction techniques to facilitate retrieval and sensemaking.
See the MK:Smart project for our relevant previous work.
For more information and to apply, contact Enrico Motta or Francesco Osborne.
The deadline for applications is 10 April 2017 – see http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/vacancies/ftphd/#sthash.hK3lMMEq.dpuf for more details on this and other opportunities.