Localot Research PhD Scholarship at UPC

A fully-funded 4 year PhD scholarship is available at the Tecnhical
University of Catalonia (UPC) in the areas of Natural Language
Processing and Machine Learning, starting September 2011.

The topics of the PhD involve information extraction, parsing and
induction of domain semantics with applications to search and
matching. The main research goal of this project is to develop new
semi-supervised statistical methods for inducing structured
representations from free text and computing semantic equivalences.

The project will be jointly supervised by Xavier Carreras and Ariadna
Quattoni. The student will join the TALP Reseach Center at the UPC in
Barcelona (http://www.talp.cat), and will be part of the PASCAL2
Network of Excellence. The student will enroll in a PhD program in
Computer Science at the UPC, with specialization in Artificial
Intelligence (http://postgrau.upc.edu/ai) or Computing (http://postgrau.upc.edu/computing).

The scolarship is co-funded by Localot Research and UPC. Localot
Research is a young start-up company based in Cambridge, MA focused on
Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Their mission is to
build the next-generation search engines for targeted applications in
finance, health and other areas. The team consists of first-class
researchers in the fields of NLP and machine learning and qualified
engineers. The company will provide real applications and challenges
to motivate the PhD research, together with data and experimental
scenarios. There will be possibilities of internships at the company
to foster collaborations.

The ideal candidate should have a degree in Computer Science,
Mathematics or Computational Linguistics. We expect a highly-motivated
student, with fluent English, good programming skills, and a creative
mind. Previous experience with topics related to the project is not
required, but will be a plus.

Applications and inquiries should be sent to Xavier Carreras and
Ariadna Quattoni ({carreras,aquattoni}(at)lsi.upc.edu). Applications
should include: your CV, a 1 page statement of research interests, 2-3
references (with email and relation) and list of publications (if
any).

The position is open until filled, but applications sent no later than
March 2011 will receive full consideration. The starting date is
September 1, 2011 (earlier or later start is possible).