Fully Funded Doctoral Studentship in Information Systems

Fully Funded Doctoral Studentship in Information Systems

Department of Computer Science, Oxford University

Supervisors: Professor Ian Horrocks and Professor Bernardo Cuenca Grau

Start Date: October 2017

TheOxford Information Systems Research Group is offering one fully-funded D.Phil. studentship in Oxford University's Department of Computer Science. The position is funded by SIRIUS, a Norwegian Centre for Research-driven Innovation that addresses the problem of scalable data access in the oil & gas industry. The student will join a team of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers working on semantic technologies in general, and in particular on the design and development of algorithms and infrastructure for large scale deductive query answering.  One of our flagship projects is the development of RDFox, a state of the art in-memory RDF triple-store and graph database. The student will work on the design of algorithms and the development of a prototypical system for reasoning over large volumes of data stored in multiple instances of RDFox running on a cluster.

Candidates are expected to have a good foundation in general computer science (data structures, sorting, searching, …). Other areas of expertise that would be relevant but not essential include:

●     Theoretical computer science (logic, proofs, complexity, …)

●     Knowledge representation and reasoning

●     Semantic technologies, including OWL and RDF

The project will involve both algorithmic foundations and prototypical implementation and evaluation. Candidates should therefore have good programming and system-building skills. Candidates must also have good writing, communication, presentation, and organisation skills. Applicants must in addition satisfy the usual requirements for studying for a doctorate at Oxford. See the University's web pages on theDPhil in Computer Science for details

The successful applicant will be working with a first class team in an internationally leading research group. They will be based in Oxford, but will be expected to make regular visits to Oslo in order to collaborate with other members of the SIRIUS team. There will also be opportunities to visit and collaborate with industry partners including the likes of Oracle, IBM and Schlumberger.

The studentship is funded at a level that will pay fees at home/EU student rates, with a stipend of at least £14,296 per annum. Applicants who will be liable for fees at the overseas rate are welcome, but will have to make up the difference between home/EU and overseas fees. There will also be generous funding to support research travel during the doctorate. The studentship will be funded for three and a half years (42 months) and will start in October 2017, although an earlier start date may be possible.

Please apply online by 30th April, 2017 quoting studentship code: IH-BCG-2017. If you have any questions please email Julie Sheppard or Ian Horrocks