Fully Funded EPSRC ICASE Doctoral Studentship on combining Semantic Technology with Machine Learning

Fully Funded EPSRC ICASE Doctoral Studentship on combining Semantic Technology with Machine Learning in collaboration with Siemens

Department of Computer Science, Oxford University

Supervisor: Professor Ian Horrocks

Start Date: October 2019

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford is offering one fully funded DPhil studentship in the Information Systems Research Group.

Project Description: Gaining a basic understanding of the structure and meaning of data is critical for many applications, including data integration, data cleaning, data mining and knowledge discovery. This is often difficult in practice due to metadata (data about the data) being missing, incomplete or obfuscated. The goal of this project is to investigate the (semi-) automatic annotation of data with rich semantics that describe its structure and meaning. Preliminary investigations suggest that this could be achieved by combining large scale semantic resources (such as online knowledge graphs and ontologies) with state of the art machine learning techniques (such as deep neural networks and semantic embedding) to automatically annotate columns and entities, and to identify structural relationships such as functional dependencies, inclusions and range and domain constraints.

The project is a collaboration with Siemens research group in Munich, who will contribute realistic use-cases and considerable research expertise in the area, as well as a significant supplement to the usual student stipend. The successful applicant will be expected to collaborate with and spend several weeks per year visiting the Siemens research group in Munich. There will also be opportunities for collaborating with the ongoing AIDA project at the Alan Turing Institute .

The successful applicant will join an internationally leading research group with a range of activities centred around semantic technology. Researchers in the group recently won the best paper prize at IJCAI, the premier international AI conference, and have presented their work at conferences in Australia, Europe and the USA. Some of our work on integrating Semantic Technology and Machine Learning was recently presented in a paper at the AAAI conference. in Hawaii. The group's research is also the basis for a successful spin-out company, Oxford Semantic Technologies.

The project will provide an annual stipend to the student of at least £18777 per annum for 4 years. The project will also cover the costs of university and college fees, travel to conferences and workshops, and provision for a laptop computer.  Students must fulfil the EPSRC eligibility requirements.

Candidates must also have good writing, communication and presentation skills. Applicants must, in addition, satisfy the usual requirements for studying for a doctorate at Oxford

You should apply online by 15th March, 2019, quoting studentship reference CS-IH-2019

For further information about the project or for informal discussions about suitability, please contact Ian Horrocks For further information about the studentship or the application process please e-mail Julie Sheppard