[unrev-II] PhD Studentships, Oct.2001 (KMi, Open Univ, UK)

From: Simon Buckingham Shum (sbs@acm.org)
Date: Tue Mar 13 2001 - 07:55:42 PST

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    Knowledge Media Institute
    The Open University, UK
    http://kmi.open.ac.uk

    PhD Studentships - to start October 2001
    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships

        *** Application deadline: May 31 2001 ***

    Dear Bootstrap Colleagues,

    Drawing personal inspiration from Doug Englebart's work, I have been
    pursuing a variety of research avenues for the last 10 years. There
    are openings in KMi for motivated researchers interested in pursuing
    a PhD combining HCI/CSCW/AI with collaborative internet technologies.
    Come and work in one of the leading European labs with superb people
    and resources!

        * Visual Hypertext for Collective Sensemaking and Organizational Memory

        * Modelling and Visualizing Research Literatures over the Internet

        * Internet Tools for Scholarly Publishing and Peer Review

    Please follow the application procedure specified on the Studentship
    page: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships

    Applicants are encouraged to contact me informally to discuss ideas
    before submitting a proposal.

    Regards,

    Simon Buckingham Shum

    ...........................................................................

    Knowledge Media Institute (KMi)

    KMi is a highly successful, rapidly expanding interdisciplinary
    laboratory founded at The Open University in 1995, and located in
    attractive new offices at The Open University's main campus in Milton
    Keynes, UK. KMi undertakes high-profile advanced research and
    development in Knowledge Media: the convergence of knowledge,
    communication and computing technologies. We offer a stimulating and
    well-endowed research environment, widely acknowledged to be at the
    leading edge of European research and development, particularly in
    new technologies for knowledge modelling and management, open
    supported learning, and synchronous and asynchronous group working.
    Our PhD development programme combines the best of European and US
    models, and you will be joining an active PhD community. The style,
    impact and content of our work are described in detail in our Web
    pages at http://kmi.open.ac.uk/.

    ...........................................................................

    PhD Studentships

         Visual Hypertext for Collective Sensemaking and Organizational Memory

         Dr Simon Buckingham Shum and Dr John Domingue

         The Challenge: capturing and structuring group knowledge in real time
         to generate a hypertextual organizational memory resource

         The successful candidate for this PhD will work on an innovative
         approach to organizational knowledge capture, as part of the
         Compendium Project [http://kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/compendium].

         In contrast to many knowledge management approaches to codification,
         Compendium recognises the importance of
         negotiation and debate when working across diverse communities of
         practice, the need to capture unexpected, non-textual ideas fluidly
         and in the same environment as expected, structured information, and
         role that visual representations can play in collective sensemaking.

         There are several possible kinds of research that could be conducted,
         depending on your background and interests. Suitable backgrounds would
         include Meeting Facilitation/CSCW (especially experience with software
         tools to assist communication), Hypertext (argumentation; open
         hypermedia), HCI (information visualization; usability studies), and
         Computer Science (Java; Visual Basic; PHP; web discussion and
         databases).

         Some example PhDs might focus on:

            * Working in organizations to introduce Compendium, facilitate
              meetings, and evaluate the outcomes (HCI/Facilitation/CSCW
              background)
            * Extending an existing Java hypertext system in the light of user
              feedback, and/or making it interoperable with other applications
              enabling concept maps to be morphed into and out of other
              representations.

         Relevant publications:

         Applicants will be expected to have formed ideas based on papers on
         the Compendium Project website [http://kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/compendium]

    ...........................................................................

         Modelling and Visualizing Research Literatures over the Internet

         Dr Simon Buckingham Shum and Dr John Domingue

         The Challenge: Providing researchers with next generation tools for
         tracking and analysing research concepts

         The successful candidate for this PhD will join a dynamic team working
         on the Scholarly Ontologies digital library project
         [http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/scholonto].

         There are several
         possible kinds of research that could be conducted, depending on your
         background and interests. Suitable backgrounds would include Hypertext
         (semantic systems; open hypermedia), HCI (information visualization;
         usability studies), CSCW (collaborative construction of shared
         information spaces; classification theory/boundary objects), AI
         (ontologies; knowledge modelling), Digital Libraries (document
         semantics; DL user interfaces; RDF/metadata) and Computer Science
         (information extraction; Java/web user interfaces; web databases).

         Some example PhDs might focus on:

            * Understanding how researchers conceptualise their fields, and
              research literatures
            * Designing and evaluating visualizations and other advanced
              services
            * Implementing information extraction technologies to identify
              scholarly claims in documents, in order to seed a knowledge base

         Relevant publications:

         Applicants will be expected to have formed ideas based on papers on
         the Scholarly Ontologies Project website

                         ....................................

         Supervision:

         The above 2 projects will be jointly supervised by Dr Simon Buckingham
         Shum and Dr John Domingue. Dr Buckingham Shum has expertise in fields of
         human-computer interaction, design rationale, graphical argumentation
         and electronic journals. Dr Domingue has expertise in human-computer
         interaction, information visualization, and knowledge engineering,
         specifically collaborative, web-based ontology construction.

         We encourage informal enquiries from prospective students who want to
         discuss ideas.

         Additional Information:

            * KMI Website: http://kmi.open.ac.uk
            * KMI's Studentship Website: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/
              provides links to * KMI studentship policy * KMI studentship FAQs
              * OU Research Degrees Prospectus * OU Application Form
              * Writing KMi PhD Proposals
            * Simon Buckingham Shum: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/sbs/
              (email: S.Buckingham.Shum@open.ac.uk, tel: 01908 655723)
            * John Domingue: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/domingue/
              (email: J.B.Domingue@open.ac.uk, tel: 01908 655014)

    ...........................................................................

         Internet Tools for Scholarly Publishing and Peer Review

         Dr Simon Buckingham Shum and Dr Stuart Watt

         The Challenge: Designing and evaluating next generation scholarly peer
         review tools in the age of internet publishing

         The successful candidate for this PhD will join an innovative project
         investigating new forms of scientific/scholarly publishing and peer
         review for the internet.

         Technologies for scholarly interpretational spaces

         A key problem we are working on in KMi is how to extend the Net beyond
         being a vast document library by adding interpretational spaces -
         technology mediated forums for interpreting, making sense, critiquing,
         debating, making new connectionsŠ Meaning arises from perspectives,
         which make new connections. How can technologies like open hypertext,
         annotation, discussion/argumentation systems, ontologies, text
         analysis and visualizations of documents and associated concepts help
         the interpretation of resources in the library.

         In sum, without interpretation, there is no meaning or significance,
         and we are left drowning in the information flood. We want to provide
         computational support for interpretation. KMi is interested in
         implementing interpretational spaces for researchers to analyse
         documents.

         Background to KMi systems

         JIME: E-journal peer review. The Journal of Interactive Media in
         Education (JIME) is a peer reviewed, electronic journal (ejournal),
         published since 1996, to promote interdisciplinary dialogue through
         the use of a Web-based peer review process. JIME articles are
         published in a purpose-designed Web document-discussion user
         interface, which tightly links the article to an area for review
         comments and discussion. Reviewers can post comments under threads
         based on the journal's review criteria (e.g. Originality of Ideas), or
         they can make section-specific comments. The review process is
         designed to enable authors, reviewers and the wider community engage
         in constructive discussion as opposed to the conventional anonymous
         'issuing of a verdict'. Authors have the right of reply, and reviewers
         (non-anonymous) are accountable for what they say. This intellectual
         history is preserved with the final publication in the form of an
         edited version with the most significant comments and replies, which
         remains an open forum for authors (e.g. to post updates) and readers
         to comment. <http://www-jime.open.ac.uk>

         D3E web document discussion infrastructure. There are hundreds of
         links in a given article, which are generated by a Web publishing
         toolkit called D3E (Digital Document Discourse Environment). D3E has
         found many applications beyond JIME, is under development on an open
         source basis, and is in use by a variety of groups.
         <http://d3e.open.ac.uk>

         Open Archives Eprint Servers. A promising platform for delivering
         these services to the widest possible community is the Open Archives
         Initiative (OAI), specifically, their Eprint server software. The Open
         Archives Initiative <http://www.openarchives.org> has developed a
         protocol to enable researchers to search for scholarly documents over
         multiple ePrint servers. The Eprints server 'shell' that enables a
         knowledge community to self-archive their documents is now freely
         available <http://www.eprints.org>. The basis for providing
         third-party services on top of the eprint server data is outlined in
         the report of the first prototype implementation

         PhD focus

         The goal of the PhD will be to survey the range of proposed models for
         scholarly publishing and peer review on the internet, and in the light
         of this analysis, to implement and evaluate an environment that could
         support research comunities. OAI and D3E are prime candidates, given
         KMi's experience with them, but the strategy taken will clearly have
         to take into account the rapid technical developments that
         characterise internet and knowledge-based publishing.

         Applicants should be able to demonstrate that they can work with
         relevant web server technologies and standards. OAI servers ar
         implemented in Perl and MySQL on Linux/Unix servers. The D3E toolkit
         generates files for D3E-Phorum a customization of the PHP-based Phorum
         system.

         However, the ideal candidate will also have experience, or a strong
         interest, in the social dimensions that ultimately will make or break
         tools to support publishing and discourse in scholarly research.

         Relevant publications:

         Applicants will be expected to have formed ideas based on examining
         JIME and associated papers, and OAI and Eprint documents.

         Supervision:

         This studentship will be jointly supervised by Dr Simon Buckingham
         Shum and Dr Stuart Watt. Dr Buckingham Shum has expertise in fields of
         HCI, design rationale, graphical argumentation and electronic
         journals. Dr Watt has expertise in software agents for online communities,
         knowledge modelling and management, and the teaching of cognitive
    modelling.

         We encourage informal enquiries from prospective students who want to
         discuss ideas.

         Additional Information:

            * KMI Website: http://kmi.open.ac.uk
            * KMI's Studentship Website: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/
              provides links to * KMI studentship policy * KMI studentship FAQs
              * OU Research Degrees Prospectus * OU Application Form
              * Writing KMi PhD Proposals
            * Simon Buckingham Shum: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/sbs/
              (email: S.Buckingham.Shum@open.ac.uk, tel: 01908 655723)
            * Stuart Watt: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/snw2/
              (email: S.N.K.Watt@open.ac.uk, tel: 01908 654513)

    ...........................................................................

    -- 
    

    ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ Dr Simon Buckingham Shum mailto:sbs@acm.org Knowledge Media Institute http://kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs The Open University Tel: +44 (0)1908-655723 Milton Keynes Fax: +44 (0)1908-653169 [office] MK7 6AA, UK eFax: +44 (0)870-122-8765 [direct] ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ Jnl. Interactive Media in Education: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk "What gets measured is not always important, and what is important cannot always be measured" A. Einstein "Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens" J. Hendrix

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