2011 PhD Funding Positions at ICT International Doctoral School, University of Trento, Italy

Study Subject:Combining ontological and process-based reasoning,Mixing logical and statistical reasoning,Structured Data Indexing and Retrieval
Employer:University of Trento
Level:PhD
Scholarship Description:3 positions are currently available within the DKM research unit. These PhD positions are among the grants of the ICT International Doctoral School, University of Trento.This call is under project specific grants with FBK and will be jointly supervised by FBK and the ISTC-CNR, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, Trento. Semantic Business Process Management [4, 2] has the main objective of improving the level of automation in the spec- ification, implementation, execution, and monitoring of business processes by extending business process management tools with the most significant results from the area of Semantic Web. For instance, when the focus is on process mod- eling, i.e. the activity of specification of business processes at an abstract level, annotating process descriptions with labels taken from a set of domain ontologies can provide additional support to the phase of business analysis, or to the creation of valid process diagrams, which not only comply with the basic requirements of the process semantics, but also satisfy properties that take into account the domain specific semantics of the labels of the different process elements.

Humans solve the problems of interpreting multimedia documentation by both exploiting structural regularities in the data, as well as making use of common sense and specialized knowledge that explicitly represents the meaning of data. In spite of this simple observation, current approaches to processing content over the Internet are based either on a statistical approach, which exploits the regularities of the content encoded in a statistical model (using machine learning methodologies), or, alternatively, by logical approaches, by exploiting logical knowledge encoded via logical theories (semantic web and ontologies). In both cases this unilateral approach leads to a limitation in the performance or in the quality of the results.

Scholarship Application Deadline:16th of March 2011

Further Scholarship Information and Application