Concordia's new Undergraduate Student Research Award program [2] provides funding for undergraduate students in a summer research position. One opportunity for students in Computer Science or Software Engineering is to spend this summer at the Semantic Software Lab [3].
The Semantic Software Lab is a prolific and friendly research lab, focused on open science research at the intersection of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, in particular research on text mining, intelligent information systems, and smart knowledge management based on ontologies and linked data. Our software is in active use by both scientists and students at Concordia and around the globe, and the successful results of this summer job will be incorporated into our next releases.
The proposed summer job, under the supervision of Prof. René Witte, will provide you with invaluable experience of working in a low-stressed environment on real-world small-scale projects in collaboration with other student researchers. You will learn state-of-the-art techniques from the AI and Semantic Computing domains and acquire programming experience with open source software and open data. You are expected to work autonomously during the project, while keeping close contact with the supervisor and other team members. Furthermore, depending on the achieved results, we will provide the opportunity for publishing them in the context of a scientific conference.
The candidate will be provided with working space at the Semantic Software Lab, located in the EV building, and awarded $5,625.00 for the 16 weeks of full-time work (May 1–August 30, 2013). For more information, in particular the eligibility criteria, please visit the Concordia USRA [4] webpage.
Job Description
[5]
Semantic Assistants Development
You will be working on the Semantic Assistants [6] project, in particular the server component. The main task of the Semantic Assistants server is to publish text mining pipelines (e.g., for information extraction or automatic summarization) in a unified manner using standard W3C web services, so that various clients can easily consume them, regardless of their complex nature. The Semantic Assistants server currently offers two endpoint types: one using the HTTP-based RESTful approach and a SOAP endpoint implemented in JAX-WS technology. These services are then consumed by clients, such as mobile devices (based on Android), web information systems (like MediaWiki) and Desktop clients (like OpenOffice or Eclipse). Depending on the qualification of the candidate, the work will involve enhancements to the server architecture and/or the client infrastructure.
Required Qualifications
- Excellent programming skills
- Familiarity with service-oriented architectures (SOA)
- Good understanding of web-based information system concepts, especially the Client-Server model
- Advanced knowledge of Java and its multi-threading concepts
- Comfortable with HTML, lightweight JavaScript scripting and using the jQuery library
- Comfortable with using the Subversion (SVN) revision control system
- Comfortable with using the Eclipse IDE
Preferred Qualifications
- Previous experience in User Interface design or web service development
- Basic familiarity with Natural Language Processing and text mining concepts
- Knowledge of modern web standards like RDF, RDFS, OWL, and SPARQL
- Previous experience in working with GATE (General Architecture for Text Engineering)
Deadline
The deadline for application at the Semantic Software Lab is February 26th, 2013.
Please submit your CV, as well as references to previous work samples, such as open source projects or technical blog posts, through the provided link below. Should you have any questions, please contact Bahar Sateli (sateli AT semanticsoftware DOT info).
