Postdoctoral Position Available -- News/Blog Analysis

CONTACT: [log in to unmask]

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 [log in to unmask] or by mail to:

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


__________________________________________
Matthew Lebo, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
SBS S-749
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY  11794-4392
631-632-7554

http://ms.cc.sunysb.edu/~mlebo/