Post doctoral position on Visual Analytics
Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam
Application closing date: 15 November 2012 (or until suitable candidate found)
Starting data: 1 January 2013 (later starting date possible)
Duration: 3 years
Funding: Full university funding.
Topic
Visual Analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual
interfaces. It aims to provide domain experts with support for the full process of information
gathering, data preprocessing, knowledge representation, interaction, and decision making.
Applications abound in situations where the data is too voluminous to be assessed by humans alone,
while it is too complex to be analyzed in a fully automatic fashion. Examples are security,
forensics, intelligence, e-science, and business intelligence.
Motivation and embedding
The Informatics Institute has a
strong position in (interactive) multimedia analysis
as well as in machine learning and has started doing research in visual analytics.
The post doctoral position is embedded in the research theme multimedia analytics, bringing together multimedia analysis and visual analytics,
of dr. M. Worring of the Institute's Intelligent Sensory Information Systems group.
This new position should strenghten and develop the visual analytics research line.
The position has connections to several
other groups in the institute, e.g., for visual text analytics, visual mining,
security and forensics, and collaborative decision making.
Application area
Visual Analytics research is driven by the needs of users.
The application areas on which the candidate should particularly focus are
forensics, security, and intelligence. These are application areas where the size of collections
is enormous, the questions for which investigators seek answers of high complexity,
results unpredictable, and discovery serendipitous. The Informatics Institute has good relations
to end-users and domain experts within these areas.
Research tasks
The three main research tasks for the candidate are:
- Perform research in visual analytics aiming at publications in top-ranked
conferences and journals such as the VAST and Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
- Write scientific grants to fund PhD students and guide them in their work.
- Work towards a personal research grant such as a VENI grant from the Dutch Funding Agency NWO, rewarded to excellent
researchers in their field, to continue the position after three years.
Education tasks
Visual Analytics is important in various domains and we currently have teaching activities in
a number of master programs. The candidate will develop or contribute to one or more Visual Analytics related courses in the
Artificial Intelligence, Forensic Sciences, System and Network Engineering, or Information Sciences.
Requirements
We are seeking a high quality candidate satisfying the following requirements:
- PhD on Visual Analytics in a relevant field such as Computer Science or Artificial Intelligence
- Preferably some years of experience as a post doctoral researcher.
- Excellent publication record.
- Experience with and enthusiasm for teaching
- Very good analytic capabilities and programming skills.
- Good oral and written communication skills in English.