Postdoc position at Aix-Marseille University (France) in opinion
analysis and novelty discovery

Application deadline: 04/31/2015
Starting: as soon as possible.

Description:

The ADNVIDEO project, funded in the framework of A*MIDEX
(http://amidex.univ-amu.fr/en/home), aims at extending multimodal
analysis models. It focuses on jointly processing audio, speech
transcripts, images, scenes, text overlays and user feedback.

Using as starting point the corpus, annotations and approaches
developed during the REPERE challenge (http://defi-repere.fr), this
project aims at going beyond indexing at single modalities by
incorporating information retrieval methods, not only from broadcast
television shows, but more generally on video documents requiring
multimodal scene analysis. The novelty here is to combine and
correlate information from different sources to enhance the
description of the content. In particular, the use case considered may
have, in terms of technology transfer, significant economic benefits
regarding automatic information monitoring of people or brands:
automatically find the most relevant content about a person or a brand
and if this content is positive or not.

Objectives:

The candidate will participate in the development of a prototype for
video monitoring, leading to a technology transfer towards business:
* Extraction of multimodal high-level descriptors (semantic-oriented
descriptors). These semantic-oriented descriptors are extracted from
low-level descriptors, especially from text transcripts.
o Extract concepts (conceptualization) from the transcript of the audio.
o Detection of semantic chapters by aggregation of concepts extracted
shot/scene-wise
o Detection of novelty about peoples or brands
o Detection and extraction of sentiments and opinions
* Aggregation of multimodal descriptors to form the multimodal
footprint of a video.
* Matching videos and promotional material using recommendation approaches
* Validation of the video recommendation prototype.
* Participation to the scientific life of the lab, including paper publication.
The allocation of the tasks can be adjusted depending on the wishes
and skills of the candidate.

Skills:

For this project, we are looking for one candidate with a PhD degree
in the areas of information retrieval, natural language processing,
machine learning:
* Strong programming skills (C++, Java, Python?).
* Desire to produce functioning end-to-end systems, life-scale live demos
* Scientific rigor
* Imagination
* Top notch publications
* Excellent communication skills
* Enjoy teamwork

Location:

The work will be conducted in the University of Aix-Marseille at the
Laboratoire des Science de l?information et des système (LSIS
http://www.lsis.org), within the ADNVidéo project, supported by
funding from a AMIDEX foundation in collaboration with Kalyzee
(http://www.kalyzee.com/). Both LSIS and Kalysee are located in the
historical and sunny city of Marseille, in south of France
(http://www.marseille.fr/sitevdm/versions-etrangeres/english--discover-marseille).

Contact: sebastien.fournier@lsis.org
Duration: 23 month
Candidates should email a letter of application, a detailed CV
including a complete list of publications, and source code showcasing
programming skills. ---