2007-06-01: Postdoctoral position in information visualization at Stony Brook University

Postdoctoral Position Available -- News/Blog Analysis

The Lydia project builds a relational model of people, places, and other entities through natural language processing of news sources and the statistical analysis of entity frequencies and co-locations. This model can be used to identify trends and other information flows through this entity network. Please visit http://www.textmap.org/ to see our analysis of recent news and blog postings obtained from over 500 daily online news sources.

Lydia gives us a way to measure the temperature of the political, economic, and cultural world. We track hundreds of thousands different entities arising in these news sources. We establish temporal and regional biases in interest, by analyzing the frequency and positive/negative sentiment of these entity references. We identify relationships between news entities, resulting in a massive network where the vertices represent news entities, with pairs of entities linked if there is a substantive relationship between them.

A two-year postdoctoral position (potentially extensible to three years or beyond) is now available to join our team. I am looking for someone with a background in either:

      (1) natural language processing,
      (2) text mining or data mining,
      (3) graph algorithms and the science of networks, or
      (4) data analysis or visualization.

The applicant will be expected to use their expertise to improve the quality of our analysis, and help manage a team of roughly ten graduate students as we shift our focus beyond technological issues to questions of what this data means and how we can best exploit it.

Applicants *must* be U.S. citizens who will receive their Ph.D. in Computer Science, Linguistics, Economics, or a related field no later than August 2007. If interested, please send your vita and contact information electronically to skiena@cs.sunysb.edu or by mail to:

      Steven Skiena
      Department of Computer Science
      Stony Brook University
      Stony Brook, NY 11794-4400
      http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~skiena