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.
Notice that these calls falls under a special section called project specific grants and in your application you have to specify explicitly if you are interested in one of these special grants.
The positions focus on the following topics:
Combining ontological and process-based reasoning
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 (see e.g., [1]).
The ability to provide good Semantic Business Process Management services poses strong scientific challenges as it requires an integrated usage of formalisms for the representation and execution of business processes together with those used to represent ontologies and business domains, which traditionally have been developed and investigated in separate research areas.
The aim of this thesis is to investigate how we can combine logical formalisms for process and domain knowledge to enhance the quality of Semantic Business Process Management. The thesis will investigate (i) the definition of new theoretical paradigms as well as the extension of existing ones, (ii) the development of reasoning services on top of these theoretical paradigms and (iii) the tailoring these reasoning services to scenarios taken from Business Process Design and Service Provisioning, Integration and Composition.
The work originates from some recent investigation in the area of Semantic Business Process Management presented in [1, 3] and will address key research challenges in the fields of knowledge representation, software engineering and service engineering.
Skills required: good knowledge of logic and knowledge representation; reasonable knowledge of software engineering and conceptual modelling.
Mixing logical and statistical reasoning
This call is under project specific grants with FBK
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. We believe that combining statistical knowledge with logical knowledge in a unique system would improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of content management applications.
The Copilosk project at FBK aims at investigating how statistical and logical knowledge can be combined and exploited in content and knowledge management, by proposing or extending a theoretical paradigm, test it in three use cases in the area of machine translation, knowledge extraction from text, and image object recognition, and in case of positive results applying it to a real case scenario. For more information about the copilosk project please visit copilosk web site The Ph.D will be developed in collaboration with Telecom Italia.
Structured Data Indexing and Retrieval
This call is under project specific grants with Telecom
Topics of this grant are the ontological (i.e. formal) description and reasoning of knowledge according to standards developed by the Semantic Web community. Innovative research will be addressed for context-driven reasoning and indexing and will be jointly carried out with existing multimedia analysis (e.g. image recognition, speech analysis, etc.) in some augmented reality scenarios.
