postdoc-ad.txt

Two Year Post-doc in Information Retrieval, Software Stewardship
for Geosciences and Big Data

We welcome applications for a two-year Postdoctoral Scholar -
Research Associate appointment at the Viterbi School of Engineering
- Computer Science Department of the University of Southern California.
The appointment is in accordance with the university's postdoctoral
education program to provide an opportunity for recent graduates
to further develop their research skills and learn new techniques.

The candidate will be responsible for researching new and innovative
techniques for software stewardship in the Geosciences community,
specifically working with team members in the NSF EarthCube community.
Research goals include information retrieval techniques to automatically
discern open source software licenses; techniques for metadata
extraction from software toolkits used in the geosciences community,
and new methods for crawling and searching software repositories
and other areas of the web graph. In addition, ranking and retrieval
algorithms for geosciences software will be explored. The applicant
should have strong experience in Apache search software, including
but not limited to Apache Tika, Apache Solr, ElasticSearch, Apache
Lucene, and Apache Nutch. Knowledge of geosciences, Earth sciences,
is a plus, and candidates with formal training and backgrounds in
those areas will be considered. This is expected to be a cross
cutting, Data Science oriented, post doc activity. Applicants
interested in Big Data, geosciences, and in open source are encouraged
to apply.

The applicant will be connected to the mentor’s teams at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, in close
collaboration with USC. Team members include the USC Information
Sciences Institute and members there who are leading the project;
members from the University of Colorado, and from Penn State
University; and members from the Earth Science Information Partners
(ESIP) Federation. Applicants with familiarity of the ESIP community
and that have participated in projects involving geosciences data
(remote sensing; in-situ; model outputs, etc.) and stewardship, are
encouraged.

The appointment period is contingent upon providing proof of
employment authorization.  Applicants are eligible to be considered
for reappointment on a year-to-year basis, but there is no guarantee
of reappointment, which is at the university's discretion

Applicants should send a resume, cover letter and statement of
research, and three letters of recommendation to Dr. Chris Mattmann
(chris.a.mattmann@nasa.gov). Decisions will be made promptly, with
the expectation for the applicant to be in the February 2015 time
frame.