Scientific Engineer in Transformative Geo-Analytical Question Answering

Descrizione

Scientific Engineer in Transformative Geo-Analytical Question Answering Sintesi in italiano (traduzione automatica): L'organizzazione internazionale cerca un Ingegnere scientifico per il progetto GeoTrAnsQData, finanziato dall'ERC, con sede in un contesto di ricerca interdisciplinare. Il candidato selezionato fornirà supporto tecnico e assistenza per la realizzazione di un prototipo di sistema di risposta a domande geografiche. Le mansioni principali includono la cura dei dati, l'implementazione di flussi di lavoro e la gestione dell'infrastruttura, collaborando con dottorandi e ricercatori post-dottorato. È richiesta una laurea in ingegneria, informatica o un campo correlato, insieme a competenze tecniche e di programmazione solide. Il candidato dovrà anche seguire i principi di open science e contribuire alla gestione dei dati e alla loro preservazione a lungo termine. In our ERC-funded GeoTrAnsQData project, we are looking for a Scientific Engineer who can provide technical design support and implementation assistance for realizing a prototype for indirect geographic question-answering (GeoQA). Your job The project aims to answer queries beyond the straightwards retrieval of answers by enabling interaction with geodata infrastructures through dynamically constructed workflows. The selection of relevant geodata (maps), the construction and execution of workflows (i.e., transformations), and ensuring their semantic validity and correctness all play a crucial role in generating answers in the form of answer maps. You will explore these challenges together with the Principal Investigator as well as a postdoctoral researcher and two PhD candidates. We are looking for a motivated candidate with strong technical and programming skills and relevant project experience to join this interdisciplinary research team at the forefront of GeoAI and question answering research. You will contribute primarily to three areas: data, implementation, and infrastructure with user studies. Data You will work closely with PhD candidates on data curation, particularly on datasets that can serve as gold standards for training and evaluation. Your responsibilities will include interacting with (geo)data repositories, performing semantic annotation, improving data quality by data refinement (e.g., correcting mislabelled records), construction and use of knowledge graphs, and transforming data between different representations. In addition, you will contribute to enriching (meta)data with semantic information and collaborate with PhD candidates on the selection, parsing, and representation of questions. You will also help with the modelling and validation of workflows. You are expected to follow open science principles and support data management, documentation, and long-term preservation. Some potential collaboration with Dutch partner institutions is expected for this part. Implementation You will develop data analysis scripts to assess and improve data quality. Your main responsibility will be to collaborate with PhD candidates and the postdoctoral researcher on the representation and generation of workflows that transform (geo)data into answers to user questions. You are expected to be open to exploring hybrid approaches that combine symbolic and sub-symbolic AI methods. On the symbolic AI side, you will co-develop a typed language for constructing and querying GIS workflows. On the sub-symbolic side, you may be involved in post-training LLMs, in developing agentic AI systems, and building tools for manual evaluation. Therefore, familiarity with typed query languages, GIS workflows, as well as high-performance computing (HPC) and agentic AI approaches would be beneficial. In addition, you will contribute to the design and selection of metrics for validating and evaluating generated answers. Infrastructure with user Studies User studies form an important part of the project's evaluation strategy. You will support the deployment of such Q&A infrastructure on available servers. Together with PhD candidates, you will develop interfaces for collecting user input and system responses. You will also collaborate on the analysis and evaluation of collected data and ensure that all data are properly anonymised before publication. Annuncio in inglese. Fonte: Euraxess (Commissione europea).