PostDoc & PhD Vacancies

Project Title: iAd

The Centre for Digital Video Processing has one PhD position available researching information importance for extreme precision recommendation of content from large multimedia archives, with a starting date of early 2009.

Current state-of-the art systems for information access can provide efficient access to billions of documents, structured data records and multimedia files. The very success of these large-scale retrieval systems has presented users with a new "extreme precision problem": how to filter out only the useful information from ranked lists of hundreds or thousands of retrieved items. When recommending content to users, it is not simply sufficient to recommend content with high utility for a user; rather it is vital to examine the importance of the information in the context of the user's current status. A key aspect of the recommendation techniques developed in this research will be a methodology for measuring the importance for a user of a piece of information at any given time. Information importance is closely linked to the concept of information novelty (i.e. don't recommend a user something that the user already has seen, or something that tells the user nothing new).

This research is carried out as part of the iAd project (iAd - http://www.iad-centre.no/), which is a new collaboration with norwegian partners (incl. FAST/Microsoft), Dublin City University and Cornell University. It is anticipated that the PhD candidate will spend a number of months at the University of Tromso (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troms%C3%B8) during the course of the PhD research. In addition, there will be many opportunties for the student to interact with the CDVP researchers and with the iAd Project team in Norway and Cornell University.

Application Requirements
A suitable PhD candidate would be expected to have a high honours degree in computer science or engineering (or a related discipline) and be interested in developing search and recommendation techniques for large multimedia archives.

How to Apply
Any interested candidates, please send a CV and cover letter to Dr Cathal Gurrin ().

Closing Date
End Febuary 2009.

Project Title: MASTER

Lero@DCU is participating in the EU funded research project MASTER. This 3 year project is researching techniques and tools for managing assurance, security and trust in service based systems.

The business of the future will be characterized by highly dynamic service-oriented architectures where outsourcing and distributed management constitute the norm rather than the exception with an increasing complexity in security and trust requirements from regulations and business standards. Best-effort security will no longer be accepted and business entities will have to provide certified assurance services to customers and expect assured services from contractors in order to manage the associated business and technology risk. MASTER aims at providing methodologies and infrastructures that facilitate the monitoring, enforcement, and audit of quantifiable indicators on the security of a business process, and that provide manageable assurance of the security levels, trust levels and regulatory compliance of highly dynamic service-oriented architecture in centralized, distributed (multidomain), and outsourcing contexts. To this extents MASTER will identify new key indicators, protection and regulatory models and security model transformations coupled with the methodological and verification tools for the analysis and assessment of business processes. It will further define an overall infrastructure for the monitoring, enforcement, reaction, diagnosis and assessment of these indicators centralized, distributed (multidomain), and outsourcing contexts.

Lero@DCU will contribute to the design-time support tools and methodologies for modeling, analysis and verification/validation of key indicators. The supported design time process will capture high level indicators expressing the threats and risk and will analyse and refine them to obtain a level of description appropriate for specifying the behaviour of the run-time system. It will simulate or formally verify that the resulting system does indeed counter the identified threats and risks.

Lero@DCU, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, advances the state-of-the-art in software engineering for specific domains. Lero is a partnership of academic researchers and industry and is supported by Science Foundation Ireland.

Lero@DCU focuses on research into mathematical models and tools for specifying and verifying flexible dependable system.

Lero@DCU is offering a post-doctoral post and 2 funded studentships in the area of design tools for security and trust based in the School of Computing, DCU.

If you have an honour degree in Computing please contact email Dr. David Sinclair at

School Scholarship Scheme

The School is offering a number of research scholarships to outstanding graduates under its School Scholarship scheme, and is currently inviting applications. The scholarships support Ph.D. research for three years and include:

• Stipend of up to 12,700 per annum
• Full fees paid for E.U. students (non-EU nationals can apply for fee exemption)
• Fully equipped personal workspace
• Opportunities to travel to international conferences

Application Requirements

Candidates must hold, or expect to obtain, a First Class Honours degree in Computing, Mathematics or a related discipline, and agree on a research project with an academic in the School of Computing.

How to Apply

Candidates should contact a member of staff whose research interests coincide with their own. Staff members' research interests and contact details are listed on our research group webpages. Alternatively, indicate your interest to our Research Admissions Coordinator who will direct your enquiry to an appropriate staff member. The Research Admissions Coordinator may be contacted at or tel: +353 1 700 8974.

Closing Date

THE CURRENT CALL HAS CLOSED, PLEASE WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FUTURE VACANCIES

In addition to the above School Scholarship scheme, the School of Computing has a range of funded projects for which it seeks suitably-qualified graduates. To find out more, see our list of proposed M.Sc. and Ph.D. projects.

To find out more on the benefits of choosing a research programme at DCU School of Computing, download a copy of our 'postgraduate research programmes' leaflet (pdf). For further details on postgraduate research at DCU School of Computing, download a copy of our research brochure (pdf).