PhD POSITION on TOOLS FOR SYSTEMATIC REVIEWS IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Do you want to be an expert on information retrieval - the technology battle field between IT giants? Do you want to understand what it means to answer a user's request for information? What it means to answer it _well_? Do you have the technical skills to develop applications to run in the cloud and the mathematical understanding to interpret the significance of your own system's results? If so, you are invited to read below and contact us in the city with the highest quality of living in the world [1].
The Information and Software Engineering Group at the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems at the Vienna University of Technology announces the availability of a 3-year PhD position.
The position is associated to the ADmIRE project (Abstracting Domain-Specific Information Retrieval and Evaluation), funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The project will start in October 2013. Its main objective is to provide the foundation for the practice of Evidence-based IR, through creating a framework and tools for systematic reviews of IR results, and developing a methodology for conducting component-level evaluation of IR systems based on a workflow paradigm.
The main task of the PhD student is to develop a methodology for conducting systematic reviews of IR experimental results (together with the PostDocs working on the project) and to develop and implement tools to support systematic reviews by performing search for IR papers relevant to a research question, and semi-automated analysis of the texts of relevant IR papers and their results. Systematic reviews aim to synthesise the evidence supporting answers to a research question by systematically analysing the literature and performing a quantitative synthesis and meta-analysis of the experimental results of relevant papers. Systematic reviews are widely used in medicine, and are being adopted in many domains with a strong empirical approach.
To approach this task, the PhD student must have strong mathematical background (preferably including statistics), as well as a fundamental understanding of Information Retrieval. Applicants with experience in NLP will be favoured.
The position is available from October 2013 and is open until filled. The position is fulltime (40 hours a week).
For further information, contact hanbury@ifs.tuwien.ac.at. Applications for the position (including a CV) should also be sent to this e-mail address.
== About our Group ==
The working group Information and Software Engineering is part of the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems. It covers the design and development of software and information systems in research and education. The other groups cover E-Commerce, Information Systems, and Interactive Media Systems. Both theoretical and engineering-like approaches to problem solving have equal balance in our research and educational work - leading to "real world problem solving".
The Group is situated in downtown Vienna, in an environment which brings together all aspects of student and academic life. The PhD student will be part of the Information Management & Preservation (IMP) Lab,  which consists of researchers in text, music and multimedia information retrieval, as well as in digital preservation and eScience. The working language is English. A more detailed description of the IMP lab is available athttp://ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~imp/
[1] 2012 Quality of Living worldwide city rankings – Mercer survey http://www.mercer.com/press-releases/quality-of-living-report-2012