Funded PhD and Masters opportunities 2018

At AYLIEN we are using recent advances in Artificial Intelligence to try to understand natural language. Part of what we do is building products such as our Text Analysis Platform, Text Analysis API and News API to help people extract meaning and insight from text. We are also a research lab, conducting research that we believe will make valuable contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence, as well as driving further product development (have a look at our research page for more details). We are excited to announce that we are currently accepting applications from students and researchers for funded PhD and Masters opportunities, as part of the Irish Research Council Employment Based Programme. The Employment Based Programme (EBP) enables students to complete their PhD or Masters degree while working with us here at AYLIEN. For students and researchers, we feel that this is a great opportunity to work in industry with a team of talented scientists and engineers, and with the resources and infrastructure to support your work.

About us

We’re an award-winning VC-backed text analysis company specialising in cutting-edge AI, deep learning and natural language processing research to offer developers and solution builders a package of APIs that bring intelligent analysis to a wide range of apps and processes, helping them make sense of large volumes of unstructured data and content. With thousands of users worldwide and a growing customer base that includes great companies such as Microsoft, Storyful, and Sony, we’re growing fast and enjoy working as part of a diverse and super smart team here at our office in Dublin, Ireland.

About the IRC Employment Based Programme

The Irish Research Council's Employment Based Programme (EBP) is a unique national initiative, providing students with an opportunity to work in a co-educational environment involving a higher education institution and an employment partner. The EBP provides a co-educational opportunity for researchers as they will be employed directly by AYLIEN, while also being full time students working on their research degree. One of the key benefits of such an arrangement is that you will be given a chance to see your academic outputs being transferred into a practical setting. This immersive aspect of the programme will enable you to work with some really bright minds who can help you generate research ideas and bring benefits to your work that may otherwise not have come to light under a traditional academic Masters of PhD route.

Funding

The Scholarship funding consists of €24,000pa towards salary and a maximum of €8,000pa for tuition, travel and equipment expenses. Depending on candidates’ level of seniority and expertise, the salary amount may be increased.

Details & requirements

First and foremost, your thesis topic must be something you are passionate about. While prior experience with the topic is important, it is not crucial. We can work with you to establish a suitable topic that overlaps with both the supervisor’s general area of interest/research and our own research and product directions. For a detailed list of research areas which we find particularly interesting, take a look at this blog post. We are particularly interested in applicants with interests in the following areas (but are open to other suggestions):

Representation Learning
Domain Adaptation and Transfer Learning
Sentiment Analysis
Question Answering
Dialogue Systems
Entity and Relation Extraction
Topic Modeling
Document Classification
Taxonomy Inference
Document Summarization
Machine Translation

Suggested read: Survival Guide to a PhD by Andrej Karpathy You have the option to complete a Masters (1 year, or 2 years if structured) or a PhD (3 years, or 4 years if structured) degree. AYLIEN will co-fund your scholarship and provide you with professional guidance and mentoring throughout the programme. It is a prerequisite that you spend 50-70% of your time based on site with us and the remainder of the time at your higher educational institute (HEI). Open to students with a bachelor's degree or higher (worldwide) and you will ideally be based within a commutable distance of our office in Dublin City Centre.

Supervision

It would be ideal if you have already identified or engaged with a potential supervisor at a university in Ireland. However, if not, we will help you with finding a suitable supervisor.

Important dates and deadlines

Please note: all times stated are Ireland time. Call open: 1 February 2018 Application deadline (for getting in touch with us): 23 March 2018 (18:00) Final application deadline (with Irish Research Council): 12 April 2018 (16:00) Supervisor, Employment Mentor and Referee Deadline: 19 April 2018 (16:00) Research Office Endorsement Deadline: 26 April 2018 (16:00) Outcome of Scheme: 25 June 2018 Scholarship Start Date: 1 October 2018