Research Fellow, Web

Web & Internet Science

Location:  Highfield Campus
Salary:   £34,980 to £40,521 per annum
Full Time Fixed Term until 31/01/2026
Closing Date:  Friday 24 May 2024
Interview Date:   To be confirmed
Reference:  2710424FP

The starting date will be 1 August 2024, or as soon as possible thereafter. 

We are seeking a Postdoctoral researcher to work on the EPSRC-funded ESPRESSO project (“Efficient Search over Personal Repositories - Secure and Sovereign”).

The post is based at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton.  The project is researching, developing and evaluating decentralised algorithms, meta-information data structures and indexing techniques to enable large-scale data search across Personal Online Datastores (pods) hosted on distributed pod servers, addressing both keyword-based search and SPARQL querying. EPRESSO will build on and extend existing frameworks and systems such as SOLID, NSS, Dataswyft/HAT, gtk-gnutella, Gaian DB. 

You will be working with Professors Thanassis Tiropanis and Adriane Chapman (University of Southampton), Professors Alexandra Poulovassilis and George Roussos (Birkbeck, University of London), as well as our partner organisations (Dataswyft and the NExT++ Centre, Singapore), the broader research community, and industry stakeholders. 

It is essential that you have a PhD in computer science, or equivalent professional qualifications and experience; ideally your PhD or equivalent professional qualifications and experience will be in distributed database systems, information retrieval, computer networking or semantic web.  

You will have a background in distributed information management, information retrieval, algorithm design, testbed development, and measurement and experimentation with systems. You will be familiar with the technologies of the SOLID framework and related technologies. You will be responsible for research on data structures and indexes to enable queries and discovery of data stored in distributed pods under owner-specified access and caching rights. This research will also involve the use of benchmarks and the generation of synthetic datasets for experimentation in the domain on health and wellbeing. 

For further information please contact Thanassis Tiropanis (email t.tiropanis@southampton.ac.uk)

*Applications will be considered from candidates who are working towards or nearing completion of a relevant PhD qualification.  The title of Research Fellow will be applied upon completion of PhD.  Prior to the qualification being awarded the title of Senior Research Assistant will be given. 

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