PhD Postdoctoral Positions, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

The HMDB research unit (http://www2.cs.kuleuven.be/~hmdb/www/) at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium is looking for new members to join our team!

We invite applications for PhD or post-doctoral positions financed by the European research project ROLE (on Responsive Open Learning Environments,http://www.role-project.eu), the network of excellence on Technology Enhanced Learning STELLAR (http://www.stellarnet.eu/) and the Flemish project TermWise (on creating resources for specialised language use).

- The focus of the research of the first open position is on attention metadata: these describe user interactions with a diverse set of applications and web resources. The basic goal is to gather and process attention metadata in unobtrusive ways, so as to better understand and support the actions and goals of the end user across different
applications. In a first phase, the research will focus on the domain of technology-enhanced learning. Typical applications would be a personal or shared dashboard, or a recommender service.

- The focus of the research for the second open position is to develop and validate prototypes of highly responsive technology-enhanced learning environments, offering breakthrough levels of effectiveness, flexibility, user-control and mass-individualization. In this project, we play a significant role in the development of technical specifications that are the basis for enabling the interoperability and personalized mashup of learning services.

-Â The focus of the PhD research for the third open position is on term alignment, i.e. the automatic alignment of phrases and words that are translational equivalents in large multilingual document collections.
The research covers the study of existing statistical alignment models (e.g., sequence and fertility based models) and the design, development and evaluation of novel alignment algorithms including generative, discriminative and graph models.

- For the last open position, you perform research on international and national projects in collaboration with distinguished internationalteams. You develop a strong research publication record in proceedingsof important conferences and highly ranked journals. You assist inresearch funding proposal writing.Â

Funding is available immediately. The research will be carried out at the Department of Computer Science at the K.U.Leuven, in close collaboration with many of the leading research units on Technology Enhanced Learning in Europe and worldwide.

The candidate has the following profile:

a) A degree in Computer Science, Informatics or equivalent with a minimum grade of cum laude b) Interest in technology enhanced learning and metadata.

Because the successful candidate will work as a member of a project group, team spirit is indispensable.

More information about the financial compensation can be found
at http://www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jobsite/verloningspakket.html (Dutch
) orhttp://www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jobsite/welcome.html (English).

Interested applicants should send their CV and letter of application for the first two positions BEFORE AUGUST 20, 2009
to: erik.duval@cs.kuleuven.be and for the last two positions to
sien.moens-at-cs.kuleuven.be

All inquiries for further information can be sent to the same addresses