Open Early Stage Researcher/PhD Position Indra Soluciones Tecnologías de la Información SL (Indra), Spain for the NL4XAI project
Reference number: NL4XAI- ESR11
PhD research topic: Explaining contracts and documentation of assets for construction companies and real estate agents.
Objectives: To develop new Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques for the construction industry. Construction and real estate companies manage thousands of unstructured texts in the form of contracts, certificates, deeds, legal notices, gazettes and other text documents. Manually reviewing and comparing these documents is exhausting, costly and time consuming. AI and NLP-based techniques such as text classification, information extraction, named entities recognition, entity linking, automatic summarization, topic extraction and semantic analysis may enable the iterative management and access to huge amounts of document collections in more intelligent and efficient manners.
However, the main business challenge rises from designing virtual intelligent agents ready to assist humans in the understanding and use of those techniques. Namely: analysing the state of the art solutions, analysing potential GDPR-related risks, estimating expected impact in the proposed scenarios and possible go-to-market actions, and communicating/explaining findings to humans in NL.
Theoretical contributions will be validated in a real use case to meet the stakeholder needs.
Expected Results:
(1) Understanding of the state of the art in relevant aspects of NL generation/NLG for interactive XAI.
(2) Definition and implementation of a new methodology for analysing and explaining contracts and documentation of assets for construction companies and real estate agents.
(3) Validation of this methodology in a real use case.
Host institution: Indra Soluciones Tecnologías de la Información SL- Indra (Spain)
Would you like to develop your professional career in a leading technology company? Do you like new technologies? Are you interested in digital environments?
Minsait is the place where our core is essential, and people are our core. People who drive the future, open up new paths and change the rules of the game. Because at Minsait, you are the one who will leave a mark on today and tomorrow.
Within Minsait, you will be joining Onesite, our business unit focused on the development of Minsait’s own technology products. We are a multidisciplinary team composed by technicians, consultants, designers, creatives and thinkers who work in a collaborative way to design our own products in order to solve our client’s requirements. We follow the best technological standards and we apply the most advanced agile methodologies.
That is why, we are looking for people who are interested in thinking out of the box, to help us developing a new digital future and design products for a inter-connected world.
PhD Enrolment: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela-USC (Spain)
The USC hosts more than 3,000 PhD students and has been awarded the “HR Excellence in Research” by the EC under the HRS4R process. Currently, the CiTIUS hosts 31 senior researchers, which have been selected by an external scientific advisory board, and a total of 100 researchers. During the period 2016-2019, CiTIUS researchers have published more than 160 SJR journal papers and got more than 10,5 M€ from competitive R&D funds, being one third of them in collaboration with the industry sector. CiTIUS researchers have also promoted 3 new spin-offs.
Secondments: The ESR will enjoy three inter sectoral secondments of 3 months each at the premises of three project’s members as detailed in the following table.
Supervisors:
- Main Supervisor:
- Mr. Hitoshi Yano, Onesait- Indra Soluciones Tecnologías de la Información SL (Indra), hyano@minsait.com
- Mr. Carlos Rabate, Onesait- Indra Soluciones Tecnologías de la Información SL (Indra)
- PhD Co-Supervisor:
Inter-sectoral Secondment Supervisor:
- Dr. Claire Gardent, LORIA – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
- Dr. Mariët Theune, Human Media Interaction Research Group – Universiteit Twente (UTWENTE)
General requirements:
- Mobility: At the time of recruitment, the researcher must not have resided, or carried out his/her activity in Spain for more than 12 months in the 3 years prior to recruitment date. Time spent as part of a procedure for obtaining refugee status under the Geneva Convention is not taken into account.
- Career: When starting their contract (expected in April 2020), selected researchers should be within the first four years of his/her research careers and not have been awarded a doctoral degree prior to the application.
- The candidate must be working exclusively for the action.
Specific requirements:
- Degree: Degree and Master degree in Computer Sciences, Computational Linguistics or equivalent providing access to PhD program.
- Experience in theory and application of Natural Language Processing
- Skills: Python
- Language: Excellent command of English, together with good academic writing and presentation skills.
Desirable skills:
- Background in Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Tensorflow, Keras
- Ability to work independently and as part of a team.
- Strong motivation to pursue a PhD degree.
- Strong interest in interdisciplinary scientific work
- Experience in one or more related of the following tasks: classification problems, named entity recognition, topic modeling, summarization, etc.
- Experience using Spacy, NLTK, CoreNLP, OpenNLP, Gensim or similar
- Desirable but not required: Ability to communicate in Spanish
- Interested in designing and developing digital products.
- Interested in living an international experience in Spain.
Estimated starting date: 1st April 2020
Contract: Full-time contract
Duration: 36 months, including 3 secondments of 3 months each, at other consortium members’ premises (see the Secondments section above)
Salary: The Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme offers highly competitive and attractive salaries. Gross and net amounts are subject to country specific deductions as well as individual factors and will be confirmed upon appointment. This amount will be increased with the corresponding mobility allowance, and the family allowance depending of the family status of the researcher recruited.
Application Documents:
- Detailed CV in Europass format (template available in the following link) in English, highlighting the merits that are established as evaluation criteria;
- Scans of BSc and/or MSc transcripts, with certified translation in English (if the degree qualification is not in English or in the language of the hosting country);
- A motivation letter in English, highlighting the consistency between the candidate profile and the chosen ESR position/s for which she/he is applying and describing why you wishes to be an NL4XAI ESR to carry out a PhD;
- Contact details or recommendation letters of two referees in English or in certified translation;
- Scanned copy of valid identification document;
- Proof of excellent command of English (e.g., IELTS, TOEFL, Cambridge or equivalent). This is not required in case of native English speakers (i.e., English is your mother tongue).
In addition, you can add any other documents which you find relevant for the applications such as Master thesis, publications or project reports.
Evaluation criteria:
- Academic background (up to 40 points)
- Knowledge and specific achievements (up to 35 points)
- Personal interview, only for candidates achieving a minimum of 55 points (up to 25 points)
Deadline: February 14, 2020, at 23h59 CET (UCT + 01:00)
Enquiries about research content must be sent to the main PhD supervisor via email (see contact details in Supervisors section).
