Fully funded PhD position
📢 Fully funded PhD position at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University in Milton Keynes (UK) starting on 1st October 2021, which includes a stipend of £15,285 per year (tax free). Here follow two topics. Come and join our team.
Topic 1
Title: Assessing and Mitigating the Impact of Global Phenomena, Geopolitical Factors, and Bias on Research
The scientific enterprise is affected by global phenomena, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical factors and different kinds of bias. This PhD project aims at shedding light on these issues and assessing their impact across gender, countries, disciplines and others. The main objective is to exploit large-scale datasets of scholarly knowledge, i.e., scientific knowledge graphs, to analyse collaboration, productivity, and other factors with the aim of understanding the extent of the phenomenon and identifying strategies to make scientific research more inclusive and resilient to external factors.
#Scientometrics #ScholarlyAnalytics #Covid19 #ScholarlyData #SemanticWeb #ScienceOfScience #SocialScience #KnowledgeGraphs
Skillset: Software Development, Fast Prototyping, Network Science, Data Mining, Data Integration, Knowledge Graphs
Topic 2
Title: Supporting Scientific Research with Knowledge Graphs
This PhD project aims at developing a new generation of intelligent systems for exploring and analysing the scientific literature with the goal of improving efficiency and verifiability of research. The traditional document-centric approaches for searching the literature do not scale to the large number of articles produced today. We aim to introduce a modern knowledge-centric solution by automatically extracting structured representations of research knowledge from very large repositories of research publications. The candidate will design novel approaches that exploit these knowledge graphs for answering complex queries on the literature, recommending articles, predicting emerging topics, and producing research hypotheses.
#KnowledgeGraphs #ScienceOfScience #DataScience #DeepLearning #ScholarlyData #ScholarlyAnalytics #InformationExtraction
Skillset: Computer Programming Machine Learning Knowledge Graphs Interest/expertise in Research/Science
How to Apply?
Applicants are required to work up a project proposal and get in touch with me to get more information and guidance on developing their application.
The research proposal should ideally include:
1) A discussion of the problem that you want to address and why it is not current solved by the state of the art;
2) A proposal for a solution to address the problem;
3) A plan to evaluate your method;
4) A tentative schedule to implement your solution;
5) Relevant references to support your proposal.
If you send us a draft of your research proposal, we would we be happy to review it and suggest improvements. Please note that the research proposal does not commit you to any particular plan. It is simply an exercise to show that you are able to come up with a reasonable research plan and articulate a scientific discussion.
We suggest also to look at http://skm.kmi.open.ac.uk/, where you will find the main initiatives and publications associated with our group.
In case of doubt, fire a line to angelo dot salatino at open dot ac dot uk or francesco dot osborne at open dot ac dot uk.
The deadline for applications is Friday, 31st March 2021 (at 5pm UK time).
More info: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/vacancies/
