Project Specific Grants / Reserved topic scholarships 2013 - 1st call | Doctoral Program - Information Engineering and Computer Science

Project Specific Grants / Reserved topic scholarships 2013 - 1st call

The listed Project Specific Grants are related to the XXIX Call (2013) First Call 

Project Specific Grants - Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science

Computational Models of Language and Human-Machine Interaction (1)
The goal of the research fellowship is investigate computational models of language and human-machine interaction in supporting users in complex tasks such as such as translating language resources or tutoring while learning a subject or tasks. The topic of research is interdisciplinary in that it spans from machine learning to language processing and human-machine interaction.
For more information visit lab's webpage: http://sisl.disi.unitn.it
Contact: riccardi [at] disi.unitn.it

Protecting Sotware Infrastructure from Malware Attacks (1)
We will investigate the possibility to detect attacks and anomaly behaviour at an higher level of abstraction. The aim is to investigate new techniques of malware detection or adapt existing techniques to detect anomalous business transactions and or anomalous data, rather than packet, flows.
Contact: crispo [at] disi.unitn.it

 

Project Specific Grants – Trento Rise

Smart Campus (3)
The Smart Campus project (www.smartcampuslab.it) aims at providing advanced ICT solutions to catalyze the creativity and enthusiasm of all people  involved in a University campus, leading them to become active producers of innovative services designed to support their lives.
We are seeking for talented students with experience in interaction design, community design and/or in mobile service applications, and who are interested in pursuing research in these fields within the Smart Campus project.
For more information: http://www.smartcampuslab.it/join-us/.
Contact: marco.pistore [at] trentorise.eu; antonella.deangeli [at] disi.unitn.it

 

Project Specific Grants – FBK

Machine Learning for Neuroscience (2)
The PhD research program aims at carrying out research activity on machine learning methodologies for neuroscientific data analysis. The main goal is the design and the deployment of machine learning algorithms for neuroimaging-based neuroscience investigations. The research focuses on three specific tasks: brain decoding, brain mapping and brain connectivity. The challenge is to design effective computational methods for multivariate pattern analysis. The PhD research program will take place at NILab, the Neuroinformatics Laboratory raised as a joint initiative of the Bruno Kessler Foundation and the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC) of the University of Trento.
NOTE Doctoral students awarded cycle 29 scholarships financed by FBK are obliged to maintain confidentiality in regard to the disclosure and use of any information, data, software, discovery, invention, idea, method, process (in any format including the source code) or other knowledge discovered, conceived, developed and/or implemented within the research activities financed relatively not only to the object of the doctorate grant awarded to the doctoral student but also to possible changes made to the object of the grant as agreed with FBK.
URL: http://nilab.fbk.eu/en/open-positions
Contact: avesani [at] fbk.eu

Security testing of mobile applications (1)
In order to win the race against competitors, mobile applications for tablets and smart-phones are often developed with fast time-to-market approach. For this reason, development effort is often committed to deliver novel and engaging features and less attention is devoted in reviewing the quality of the code. As a result applications are released that still contain defects, faults and potential security problem. Novel approaches need to be elaborated to automate the testing phase of mobile applications, with a particular attention to security aspects, as a fundamental support to ensure both high quality and fast development model. This includes the elaboration of novel techniques for identification of potential security defects, for automatic test case generation and for developing an oracle to assess whether the system under analysis passes all the brand new test cases.
NOTE Doctoral students awarded cycle 29 scholarships financed by FBK are obliged to maintain confidentiality in regard to the disclosure and use of any information, data, software, discovery, invention, idea, method, process (in any format including the source code) or other knowledge discovered, conceived, developed and/or implemented within the research activities financed relatively not only to the object of the doctorate grant awarded to the doctoral student but also to possible changes made to the object of the grant as agreed with FBK.
Contact: ceccato [at] fbk.eu

Internet of Services (1)
Internet of Service (IoS) is a novel and promising research area that is gaining more and more interest among the research community and whose enormous potential has been clearly recognized by the industry. The main challenge of IoS is to give to billions of interested users a transparent, seamless, and trustworthy access to the millions of services available on the Web and on mobile phones. This problem cannot be handled by simply extending existing serviced-oriented approaches, since it requires a paradigm shift from software services to real world services, from application-centered services to user-centered services, from Intranet to Internet. The research effort will be to investigate novel approaches to service composition, centered on the user, her activities and her goals, providing methodologies and techniques to develop services that will be able to be composed, contextualized and customized to any situation and user’s needs.
NOTE Doctoral students awarded cycle 29 scholarships financed by FBK are obliged to maintain confidentiality in regard to the disclosure and use of any information, data, software, discovery, invention, idea, method, process (in any format including the source code) or other knowledge discovered, conceived, developed and/or implemented within the research activities financed relatively not only to the object of the doctorate grant awarded to the doctoral student but also to possible changes made to the object of the grant as agreed with FBK.
URL: http://soa.fbk.eu/en/job_opportunities
Contact: pistore [at] fbk.eu

Personalized Machine Translation (1)
The translation industry is rapidly converging to the adoption of Machine Translation (MT) into companies daily workflow thanks to the tremendous progress made by research on statistical MT (SMT) in recent years. At this stage, further progress towards producing high-quality MT output suitable for publication with little or no human intervention seems to call for innovation along two directions: correctness and utility.  The candidate will team up a world-class research effort developing new MT technologies, which are capable to learn from (and evolve through) the interaction with users and adapt to their preferences at runtime. Objectives are to advance the state-of-the-art by making statistical MT technology aware of its use, personalising the MT output to individual translators, personalising quality estimation modules to different users perceive MT quality and automatic post-editing the MT output leveraging the user-feedback.
NOTE Doctoral students awarded cycle 29 scholarships financed by FBK are obliged to maintain confidentiality in regard to the disclosure and use of any information, data, software, discovery, invention, idea, method, process (in any format including the source code) or other knowledge discovered, conceived, developed and/or implemented within the research activities financed relatively not only to the object of the doctorate grant awarded to the doctoral student but also to possible changes made to the object of the grant as agreed with FBK.
URL: http://hlt.fbk.eu/en/openpositions/phd-ict
Contact: turchi [at] fbk.eu

Speech transcription and translation for multimedia content (1)
The production of multilingual content now far outpaces our ability to translate it by human effort and we must turn to automatic methods to cope. At the same time, the growing availability of large volumes of data make automatic learning approaches for better transcription and translation feasible and indeed quite successful. The candidate will team up a world-class research effort  developing automatic transcription and translation technology that will permit the development of innovative multimedia captioning and translation services of multimedia documents between many  languages. Scientific challenges are to advance  adaptation and robustness of speech recognition and machine translation, to develop streaming technology that can convert speech from lectures, seminars, meetings, telephone conversations into streamed text in another language.
NOTE Doctoral students awarded cycle 29 scholarships financed by FBK are obliged to maintain confidentiality in regard to the disclosure and use of any information, data, software, discovery, invention, idea, method, process (in any format including the source code) or other knowledge discovered, conceived, developed and/or implemented within the research activities financed relatively not only to the object of the doctorate grant awarded to the doctoral student but also to possible changes made to the object of the grant as agreed with FBK.
URL: http://hlt.fbk.eu/en/openpositions/phd-ict
Contact: falavi [at] fbk.eu

Injecting creativity and emotional load in existing texts (1)
Language creativity  deserves particular attention because of its potential to play an active role in inducing users’ emotions and beliefs, and in providing motivational support.
In particular the thesis will approach the problem of modifying existing textual expressions towards more positively or negatively valenced versions
as an element of a persuasive system. The core technique will consist on intervening on a draft text with the goal of “coloring” it emotionally, exploiting appropriate NLP procedures such as lexical substitution and paraphrasing.
The candidate will team up a world-class research effort in developing methodologies for dealing with emotional, persuasive and creative language.
NOTE Doctoral students awarded cycle 29 scholarships financed by FBK are obliged to maintain confidentiality in regard to the disclosure and use of any information, data, software, discovery, invention, idea, method, process (in any format including the source code) or other knowledge discovered, conceived, developed and/or implemented within the research activities financed relatively not only to the object of the doctorate grant awarded to the doctoral student but also to possible changes made to the object of the grant as agreed with FBK.
URL: http://hlt.fbk.eu/en/openpositions/phd-ict
Contact: strappa [at] fbk.eu

Building the Web of Data exploiting Natural Language Processing (1)
Web of Data is about making information available on the Web accessible to machines and hence transforming how information can be found and manipulated. Of all recent initiatives oriented to create the Web of data, Wikidata is the most relevant. According to the promoters “the project aims to build a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.”
In this PhD the candidate is asked to investigate natural language processing and machine learning techniques that can be used to automatically contribute to Wikidata. Specifically, the candidate will investigate semi-supervised approaches that can bootstrap from the data already available in Wikidata and other resources such as DBpedia and Freebase. Furthermore, careful consideration will have to be given to develop approaches applicable to different languages. Finally, as Wikidata will be edited by both humans and machines, active learning could play a crucial role and open new research challenges due to the crowd-sourcing approach: will the automatic approach be able to interact with the other users during the discussion necessary to collect/approve/filter the data to publish?
NOTE Doctoral students awarded cycle 29 scholarships financed by FBK are obliged to maintain confidentiality in regard to the disclosure and use of any information, data, software, discovery, invention, idea, method, process (in any format including the source code) or other knowledge discovered, conceived, developed and/or implemented within the research activities financed relatively not only to the object of the doctorate grant awarded to the doctoral student but also to possible changes made to the object of the grant as agreed with FBK.
URL: http://hlt.fbk.eu/en/openpositions/phd-ict
Contact: giuliano [at] fbk.eu

Semantic Textual Inferences (1)
This PhD grant will explore novel approaches for textual semantic inferences, with specific interest on Textual Entailment. The goal is to advance the state of the art in general entailment algorithms (e.g. graph transformations, tree edit distance), and to define a framework where both knowledge resources (e.g. WordNet, Wikipedia) and specific inference components (e.g. temporal, causal) interact each other while trying to establish an entailment relation between two portions of text.We intend to take advantage of the Textual Entailment Open Platform under development within the EU project Excitement, (http://www.excitement-project.eu) where FBK participates as the Scientific Coordinator.
URL: http://hlt.fbk.eu/en/openpositions/phd-ict
NOTE Doctoral students awarded cycle 29 scholarships financed by FBK are obliged to maintain confidentiality in regard to the disclosure and use of any information, data, software, discovery, invention, idea, method, process (in any format including the source code) or other knowledge discovered, conceived, developed and/or implemented within the research activities financed relatively not only to the object of the doctorate grant awarded to the doctoral student but also to possible changes made to the object of the grant as agreed with FBK.
Contact: magnini [at] fbk.eu

Language complexity and readability (1)
Text complexity is a multi-faceted phenomenon that affects the readability of documents but also contributes to characterizing the style of a writer / speaker. Furthermore, also a 'subjective' component is involved in language complexity, since a document which is understandable by certain readers may be obscure for others depending on their background knowledge. With this respect, the complexity of texts is intertwined also with the problem of language use and evolution, and can be investigated from a diachronical perspective.
In this Phd, the candidate is asked to address the problem of text complexity by:
1. Analyzing the dimensions affecting this phenomenon (e.g. lexical, syntactic, semantic, discourse level)
2. Developing metrics and implementing tools able to capture such dimensions and to measure them
3. Based on these metrics and on distributional methods, analyzing and comparing language complexity across different writers / speakers, and its evolution over time.
NOTE Doctoral students awarded cycle 29 scholarships financed by FBK are obliged to maintain confidentiality in regard to the disclosure and use of any information, data, software, discovery, invention, idea, method, process (in any format including the source code) or other knowledge discovered, conceived, developed and/or implemented within the research activities financed relatively not only to the object of the doctorate grant awarded to the doctoral student but also to possible changes made to the object of the grant as agreed with FBK.
Contact: satonelli [at] fbk.eu

Crowsourcing for Development (1)
Our society is demonstrating a growing need to measure development not only in terms of profit, but also in terms of fairness, support to the community, reduction of the externalities to help build a better world for future generations. ICTs can and should have a significant role in supporting communities and making this social collaboration process more efficient and more transparent.
The problem we want to tackle with this PhD is understanding what processes and what tools can best promote ICT-mediated collaboration and mobilize and support the implementation of global-scale changes.
The PhD will have a strong orientation towards development and experimentation of novel solutions in ICT4D (ICT for Development) settings . Applicative fields include agro-foood, waste management, inclusion.
URL: http://ict4g.fbk.eu
NOTE Doctoral students awarded cycle 29 scholarships financed by FBK are obliged to maintain confidentiality in regard to the disclosure and use of any information, data, software, discovery, invention, idea, method, process (in any format including the source code) or other knowledge discovered, conceived, developed and/or implemented within the research activities financed relatively not only to the object of the doctorate grant awarded to the doctoral student but also to possible changes made to the object of the grant as agreed with FBK.
Contact: adolfo.villafiorita [at] fbk.eu