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.