Employment Opportunites
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Type S
Entered 7/10/2012
Company Harvard University, Harvard, MA
Position Graduate Student Position
Close Not Specified
Salary Not Specified
URL https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1VBuRYLobKrvW0OCgPVD8-JofXYZ9gWA9T1S-hpdJe6c
Description
The Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) has funding to support one visiting graduate student, either at the Masters (duration approx 1 year) or PhD (approx 3 year duration) level.

The student would be expected to perform research at the appropriate level (MS or PhD) using the data collections and computing resources of the ADS. Primary supervision would remain with the thesis advisor at the home institution, with local supervision by members of the ADS staff. The student would be expected to be in residence in Cambridge.

There are several possible project directions which could be supported, some of which are:

1. Text Mining/Understanding. The ADS contains the complete full text of nearly every journal article in physics or astronomy ever published, approximately 3 million articles. The ADS also has extensive metadata for these and a great deal of the gray literature, about 9 million records in total. Experimental subsets could be easily extracted (e.g. on condensed matter physics, cosmology, the properties of graphene, etc.) which are substantially larger and of higher quality than most current projects in this domain.

2. Personalized Search. The ADS has been the principal source for astronomers to access their technical literature for more than a decade, and virtually every astronomer uses the ADS on a near daily basis. It is also used routinely by a large number of scientists in related fields, such as physics, geophysics, and planetary science. The opportunity exists to use the ADS usage information, along with the dense, multipartite network of linked papers which is the ADS database, to create and test state-of-the-art personalization algorithms for scholars accessing the scholarly literature.

3. Sociological Structure of Astrophysics. The ADS data could easily support any number of network based structural studies, such as by joint word, shared co-author, bibliographic coupling, etc. The ADS usage logs provide the basis for co-use analyses. Together they could furnish a detailed view of the intellectual structure of a scientific discipline (astrophysics), and how it changes.

About the ADS: The ADS is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS has long been a leader in the creation and development of scientific information systems. A list of publications concerning the ADS can be found at: http://ads.harvard.edu/pubs/ads_bibliography.html. The ADS recently launched ADS Labs, a platform featuring new technologies and services. These include a new search interface; new ranking options and support for advanced searches; filtering of results based on a variety of criteria; interactive visualizations of paper and author networks; recommendations and notifications; and impact evaluation via bibliometric summaries. The ADS is accessible at http://ads.harvard.edu and ADS Labs is available at http://adslabs.org