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Working
in JRC's Language Technology Group
Good computational linguists are invited to register with the EPSO database now
Disclaimer
You will not find official JRC information on this page, but my
own personal summary, which is not legally or otherwise binding. For the official
up-to-date information, please refer to the main JRC web site:
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/ or to
the web site of the JRC's Institute for the Protection and Security of the
Citizen (IPSC): http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/.
Types of contracts
You will find information about different
ways of working at the JRC, and on contract types, on the JRC
main page http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/index.cfm,
where you should click on jobs.
In order to get life time positions (Civil Servant positions),
it is obligatory to pass an official Europe-wide selection procedure
and to then be chosen for an open position. For details, see http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/index.cfm?id=3440.
For other types of contracts (3-year Contractual Agents, 4-year
temporary agents, visiting scientists, seconded national experts,
doctoral and post-doctoral grant holders, internship contracts,
etc.), the longest possible total stay at the JRC in Ispra is
6 years. However, most contracts are shorter (6 months to three
years).
The most common contract type
for scientific staff is called Contractual Agent (CA).
For these contract types, we can only
hire people who have previously been registered in the European
Commission's recruitment database (EPSO
database), which includes passing a test. Apart
from people with a scientific background, we are also very much
interested in good programmers that can help us customise tools
to specific users and turn existing prototypes into robust and
fast software. Please use 'computational linguistics' as one of
the fixed keywords when describing your profile so that we are
sure to find your CV when searching the database for relevant
staff! For eligibility criteria and other details, see http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/index.cfm?id=3730.
The JRC also publishes, on an irregular basis,
a call for interest for Ph.D. (category 20 grant) and
post-doc scholarships (category 30 grant) (maximally
3 years duration) as well as for Visiting Scientists (category
40 grant) and Seconded National Experts (SNE).
The latter two are high-level posts with a duration of between
6 months and 2 years. These four types of posts are advertised
on the main JRC
web site: http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/index.cfm?id=2030.
Seconded National Experts are paid by their national
home organisation (ministries, national research centres, universities,
companies). Category 20 and 30 grant holders
can still be hired through a selection procedure based on the
applicants' CVs, wtihout passing a test. Due
to the effort to integrate new and future EU Member States quickly,
applicants from these countries are particularly welcome.
Internship (stage;
Praktikum; tirocino;
traineeship;
in-service training
period) at the JRC.
Generally speaking, we seek students or recent graduates to spend
an internship with our motivated and successful multinational
team of scientists and developers producing concrete and widely
used applications. Successful applicants will want to produce
hands-on results and to work in a team.
The trainees will learn about our multilingual text analysis
tools (covering between 19 and 45 languages) and their integration
into complex and highly used web portals: our news analysis pages
are visited with up to 2 Million hits per day. The trainees will
also get experience of working in the multilingual, multinational,
multi-disciplinary environment of an international organisation.
Contents: Depending on your knowledge and background, you can expect
to work on one or more of the following subject areas:
- Information Extraction: named entities, relations, event scenarios,
...;
- Multilingual multi-document summarisation (summarization);
- Sentiment analysis (Opinion Mining; Subjectivity analysis;
News bias);
- Writing English event and relation extraction rules;
- Document Clustering, Categorisation (Classification; Categorization);
- Terminology extraction, multilingual lexicology;
- Social network analysis on the basis of the NewsExplorer
name database;
- Visualisation;
- Topic detection and tracking (TDT), Trend detection;
- Symbolic or statistical approaches;
- Adapting the JRC’s tool set to new languages;
- Web log analysis for our applications;
- Applying text analysis tools to the medical or political domains;
- Mining the NewsExplorer name database;
- JAVA re-implementation of PERL programs;
- Web technology; databases; parsers; part-of-speech taggers;
finite state transducers;
- ...
Requirements: Applicants must have good programming
skills, ideally in JAVA or PERL, and must be able to use English
as a working language.
Useful knowledge and skills: Databases, web
technology, statistics, XML, knowledge of several natural languages
(even passive), knowledge of - or interest in - medicine or political
science, experience of working with thesauri, ontologies, dictionaries,
machine learning, bootstrapping methods.
Languages: We are potentially interested in multilingual
applicants (including passive knowledge). You must be able to
use English or Italian as a working language.
Academic background: Applicants from the fields
of Computational Linguistics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Statistics,
Linguistics or related areas are welcome.
At http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/showdoc.php?doc=job/call_rules_2007.pdf,
you will find the JRC rules for trainees. In the following,
you will find my own summary of the general conditions, but
please see the Disclaimer above.
Nationality and other eligibility criteria:
This scheme is mainly for nationals of EU Member States. A limited
number of posts may be reserved for applicants from non-member
countries, in particular from Associated Candidate Countries,
Associated States and Developing Countries. In line with the EU
enlargement activity of the JRC, we would be particularly
pleased to receive visitors from the new and the potential future
EU countries. Eligibility criteria are laid out in a directive
available in the recruitment
section of the main web site (see 'further information', below).
Duration and starting date: Traineeships can
last between three and twelve months. A longer period may be possible
if the work carried out is part of the trainee's thesis or dissertation.
We prefer longer stays over shorter ones. Traineeships can start
on the first or the 16th of any month of the year (exception
16 December and 1 January).
Admission procedure: Please follow the instructions on
the call
site. Outside calls, please get in touch with a member
of the JRC's Language Technology team to check whether a position
is open and whether your profile fits our needs. In the positive
case, we will discuss the current possibilities with you. Any
application will be evaluated by a general selection committee
that meets on demand. After our and their approval, you will receive
a reply and you will be asked to provide some documentation such
as a penal and a medical certificate. When the JRC receives these
documents, it will take a minimum of one month before you
can start. Please consider this long procedure in your planning.
Remuneration: The Joint Research Centre
in Ispra pays trainees a remuneration of 963 Euro per month, except
if they live close-by, in which case they are paid 481 Euro. Travel
cost for arrival and departure can be refunded. People like to
come here to get work experience in the multilingual, multi-national
and multi-disciplinary environment of our international organisation,
to enjoy the 'Erasmus' feeling of the trainee life here and the
related parties, and also to enjoy the lakes and mountains of
this attractive area.
Short-term and cheap housing for interns is often
available at the JRC-owned ‘Foresteria’ (very close to the JRC). There
is a waiting list for these flats, so the application for housing
should be made as early as possible. Here are pictures of one of the student flats:
living room with
kitchen corner,
bed room,
bathroom,
corridor,
terrace,
surroundings back
and front. In case
you are looking for accommodation outside the JRC, our
trilingual list of housing terms could be useful.
Transport to work for people who do not live
in the near-by JRC flats is free. There are buses covering the
surrounding area (including Milan and Varese; see the JRC
bus map and the bus
time table, status June 2009) arriving at the JRC about 8:30
in the morning and leaving at 17:15 Monday to Thursday and 16:30
on Friday. There is a free JRC car service to the airports for
work-related travel.
Food at the ‘mensa’ (lunch time only) is good and
relatively cheap. Average lunch time meals cost between 2 and 6 Euros.
Further information: For details on the training scheme, including
further eligibility criteria, see the dedicated page on the JRC web site.
Go to http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/, then
click on
jobs. If you have questions regarding your eligibility, the duration,
the payment, or any other issues of an administrative nature, please contact
our Institute's functional mail box JRC-IPSC-STAGE@ec.europa.eu.
For questions regarding the technical-scientific contents of the work, contact
one of the Language Technology staff.
The JRC and
Ispra
Geographic position: The Joint Research
Centre is situated near Ispra at the Southeast end of the
Lago Maggiore, about 45 car minutes from the Swiss border (in
the North) and the city of Milan (in the East) (See Ispra
on a map). There are several other lakes nearby. Nearest airports
are Milano Malpensa (ca. 30 car minutes) and Milano Linate (ca.
60 car minutes). See the JRC's
home page, to find out about our work, current acitivities,
events, etc. See Ispra's
web page (in Italian) for more information about the town.
To see photographs of Ispra, click on 'Il
Paese' and follow the various hyperlinks on the left. A former
colleague also took some splendid photographs
of Ispra.
The international community working at the JRC is engaged in a
large variety of cultural and sports activities offering over thirty
sports clubs and interest groups. Sports activities
include Aikido, alpinism (trekking, skiing, climbing), badminton,
basketball, billiard, bowling, bridge, chess, cricket, cycling, dance,
diving, football, fitness training, gymnastics, golf, handball, horse
riding, hockey, ice skating, judo, karate, rugby, shooting, skiing,
square dance, swimming, table tennis, tennis, volleyball and wind
surfing. Furthermore there are clubs for cultural and other
activities covering such diverse areas as amateur radio,
ceramics, choir singing, computers, gardening, mineralogy, philately,
photography, television and ufology.
There are about 2000 people working at the Ispra
site of the JRC, coming from all EU member states and other countries.
The language spoken at the Centre is different from office to
office, but dominant languages are Italian, English, French and
German. Due to the large variety of work activities and the multi-disciplinary
character of the work carried out at the JRC, it is normal to
meet people from very diverse areas.
You can read about the mission
of the JRC and of
the Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen
on the main pages.
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