job for scientific programmer at Natural History Museum Naturalis Leiden

[Nieukerken, E.J. van]

The Induction of Linguistic Knowledge (ILK) research group of Tilburg University's Department of Language and Information Science, Faculty of Arts, and Naturalis, the National Museum of Natural History at Leiden, The Netherlands, are seeking: 
 
a scientific programmer, full-time, three years 
 
to become a member of the research team for the MITCH (Mining Information in Texts from the Cultural Heritage) project, funded within the CATCH (Continuous Access to the Cultural Heritage) programme of NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). The three-person MITCH team, composed of a Ph.D. student, a  post-doc researcher, and the scientific programmer, are affiliated to Tilburg University, but work for at least 60% at the Naturalis research labs in Leiden. 
A lesser known but very valuable treasure of Naturalis, the Netherlands National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, is the collection of logs kept by the many biologists and geologists that travelled on board the Dutch trading ships for centuries. The logs have been created and kept with the same care as the animals and fossils they describe. The value of Naturalis' collection lies in the combination: the logs are the key to information and knowledge about the collection, which are essential for research in the description and evolution of animal species. The sheer quantity of available log data necessitates the use of technological tools to mine it. The MITCH project aims to do just that: to use techniques from language technology, text mining (information extraction, entity recognition, factoid detection), and data mining / machine learning to convert logs to searchable databases. 

The deadline for this job opening is March 20, 2006.
For more information, see: http://ilk.uvt.nl/jobs/ilk2006-mitch2.html