Cross-linguistic approaches for representing place and movement

Organization
Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
Reference Code
IC-18-18
How to Apply

Create and release your Profile on Zintellect – Postdoctoral applicants must create an account and complete a profile in the on-line application system.  Please note: your resume/CV may not exceed 2 pages.

Complete your application – Enter the rest of the information required for the IC Postdoc Program Research Opportunity. The application itself contains detailed instructions for each one of these components: availability, citizenship, transcripts, dissertation abstract, publication and presentation plan, and information about your Research Advisor co-applicant.

Additional information about the IC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program is available on the program website located at:  https://orau.org/icpostdoc/

If you have questions, send an email to ICPostdoc@orau.org.   Please include the reference code for this opportunity in your email. 

Application Deadline
3/12/2018 11:59:00 PM Eastern Time Zone
Description

Research Topic Description, including Problem Statement:

The goal of this research is to develop scalable, cross-linguistic methods for representing and analyzing location, place, and movement. Recent research in ethnophysiography and cognitive geography has provided examples, often by comparing smaller datasets, of how different language communities and cultures represent and conceptualize place references and movement terms. To scale up these approaches, there are many new, unstructured datasets (including text and speech data) that can be combined with more traditional gazetteer information to capture local geographic knowledge including information about usage of vernacular place names and spatial relationships. This research aims to exploit these data to characterize place and movement representations across many language communities to investigate new approaches for integrating a variety of distributed contributors and data sources, methods for harvesting toponym usage information that is contained implicitly in unstructured data, as well as methods for identifying patterns in vernacular place name and movement term usage by different linguistic and cultural communities.

Example Approaches:

The proposed research may address all or any part of this challenge:

  • Methods for collecting and harvesting unstructured data, in particular non-English content, to populate spatial-temporal place name usage datasets.

  • Automated methods for parsing and coding spatial relationship and movement descriptions across multiple languages.

  • Methods for associating place name and spatial relationship term usage with particular communities.

  • Methods that incorporate both structured and unstructured data and that handle participatory and inferred collections as well as authoritative data.

Qualifications

Postdoc Eligibility

  • U.S. citizens only
  • Ph.D. in a relevant field must be completed before beginning the appointment and within five years of the application deadline
  • Proposal must be associated with an accredited U.S. university, college, or U.S. government laboratory
  • Eligible candidates may only receive one award from the IC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program.

Research Advisor Eligibility

  • Must be an employee of an accredited U.S. university, college or U.S. government laboratory
  • Are not required to be U.S. citizens
Eligibility Requirements
  • Citizenship: U.S. Citizen Only
  • Degree: Doctoral Degree.
  • Discipline(s):
    • Chemistry and Materials Sciences (12 )
    • Communications and Graphics Design (6 )
    • Computer, Information, and Data Sciences (16 )
    • Earth and Geosciences (21 )
    • Engineering (27 )
    • Environmental and Marine Sciences (14 )
    • Life Health and Medical Sciences (45 )
    • Mathematics and Statistics (10 )
    • Other Non-Science & Engineering (5 )
    • Physics (16 )
    • Science & Engineering-related (1 )
    • Social and Behavioral Sciences (28 )
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