Research/Lead Scientist

The Leibniz Institute for Educational Research and Educational Information (DIPF) in Frankfurt am Main is a federally and state-funded member of the Leibniz Association. The Information Management Group at the DIPF's Information Center for Education is currently seeking a

Research Scientist or Lead Scientist
(full-time, for an initial term of two years, at the EG13 or EG14 TV-H pay grade)

in the field of

Collaborative Information Management / Automatic Text Assessment and Classification

for its Frankfurt am Main location.

The position serves to establish a new research direction under the leadership of Prof. Marc Rittberger. The group is part of the emerging focus area "Computer Science for Education" at the Information Center for Education. The group will cooperate closely with Department of Computer Science (UKP Lab, Prof. Iryna Gurevych) at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. It is at the core of a newly established joint institutional research network for knowledge processing at DIPF and at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

The position's focus will be on the automatic text assessment and classification in innovative applications of computer science to the educational content. Examples include scientific publications in educational research or user-generated content on educational topics in the Web. Innovative methods of computer science, text analysis methods as well as information science and their integration will be researched. The goal is to research novel approaches to digital content in the Web and its collaborative processing. Possible research topics in computer science include modeling the quality of content, keyphrase extraction or assignment and topic classification of textual documents, collaborative filtering and personalized content delivery.

The competition is open to highly qualified PhD holders and (in justified cases) excellent holders of master or diploma degrees working towards a leadership position and a scientific career.

Requirements:

• a very good to excellent completed doctoral or other degree in computer science (in natural language processing, information science or a related field);
• a good command of spoken and written English and at least basic knowledge of German;
• experience in text analysis, information processing or machine learning and the ability to program in Java;
• ability to work independently, personal commitment and teamwork skills, communication skills, and willingness to cooperate with others.

• excellent scientific qualifications as evidenced by publications in leading conferences;
• experience with third-party funding and project management;
• previous development and implementation of university courses.

The position is a fixed-term contract with an option to extend it, provided certain conditions are met. We offer the possibility of further scientific qualification towards a doctoral degree or Habilitation at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. The salary is based on TV-H (the collective bargaining agreement for public employees in Hesse). A part-time working arrangement is possible.

As a scientific institution, the primary goals of the Leibniz Institute DIPF are high-profile basic research and innovative scientific services. Particular importance and visibility is attached to their application to education in the public sector. DIPF avails itself of the expertise of computer science at TU Darmstadt to build a research center for knowledge processing and educational computer science.

The Department of Computer Science of TU Darmstadt is regularly ranked among the best in Germany. Among its distinguishing features are its expertise in semantic language processing, text mining, and information retrieval, as well as its powerful infrastructures for the aggregation and evaluation of knowledge.

_Contact_:
Applications (including CV, details of previous academic work, educational and professional references, and final thesis and/or three key publications in electronic form) should be submitted under reference-no IZB 2012-10 by November 23, 2012 to Prof. Dr. Marc Rittberger, Deutsches Institut fur Internationale Pädagogische Forschung (DIPF), Postfach 900270, 60442 Frankfurt am Main.