BIOINFORMATICS APPOINTMENT

[Rob Huxley]

Research Associate in Bioinformatics:
Information Extraction from Botanical Texts

University of Manchester, Department of Computer Science,
with the Department of Botany at the Natural History Museum, London.

The MultiFlora project has a two-year RA post at the University
of Manchester to work on the extraction and correlation of information
from botanical texts. We will use existing techniques such as partial
parsing and keyword matching to analyse plant descriptions from
traditional Floras. The novel aspect of the project is the analysis
of several different descriptions of each plant species, and correlation
of the results.  We expect that the union of the information derived
from multiple sources will be both larger and more reliable than the
set of information derived from any one source.

The ideal candidate will have a good background in botany or the
biological sciences more generally, natural language processing, or
knowledge representation, and willingness to learn the relevant aspects
of the others. Good programming skills are essential; familiarity with
object-oriented programming, especially Java, would be an advantage.

The appointment will be made on the RA1A or RA1B scale (up to
GBPOUNDS 18,185 depending on qualifications and experience). Start date
4 December or as soon thereafter as possible.

Further details at

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/ai/MultiFlora/

or from
Mary McGee Wood
Department of Computer Science
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL
Tel. 0161 275 6167
mary at cs.man.ac.uk

Closing date 5 November 1999.