Location: University of Maryland, College Park
Salary: $11/hour for (up to) 30 hours per week
Closing Date: May 20, 2008
Employment period: May 26-August 29 (any 12 of those 14 weeks)

BACKGROUND: The PopIT project (http://www.wam.umd.edu/~pwang/PopIT) is a collaboration between social scientists and computer scientists to develop new techniques for scalable computational analysis of large text collections. The National Science Foundation has provided funds for one talented computer science undergraduate to join our team for an intensive summer research period. The focus of the project this summer will be on modeling factors affecting the adoption of information technology by organizations and individuals. Our goal on the computational team this summer will be to feed our social science colleagues with a steady stream of new capabilities to help evolve their analysis techniques. That will in turn help us to recognize limitations in our technology that we will ultimately need to overcome.

DUTIES: The student will work as part of a team consisting of 3 faculty members, 3 graduate students, and possibly one or more undergraduate students from the social sciences. This summer, the computational team (one faculty member, one graduate student, and you) will focus on (1) content acquisition by Web crawling, (2) extension of automated information extraction tools to accommodate new entity and content types, and (3) application of supervised machine learning techniques for text classification.

QUALIFICATIONS: Experience with Perl, Java, Ruby, C++ and/or similar programming language(s) at the level of CMSC 132 is required, and completion of CMSC 351 (algorithms) and/or CMSC 420 (data structures) would be awesome.

TO APPLY: Send a resume to Doug Oard (oard@umd.edu) and Lidan Wang
(lidan@cs.umd.edu) by 5 P.M. on Tuesday, May 20.