PhD: « Sustainability and Explainability through Learning on Large Knowledge Graphs » – 36-months contract

Updated: about 2 months ago
Location: Saint Etienne, RHONE ALPES
Job Type: FullTime
Deadline: 05 May 2024

11 Mar 2024
Job Information
Organisation/Company

Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint Etienne
Research Field

Other
Researcher Profile

First Stage Researcher (R1)
Country

France
Application Deadline

5 May 2024 - 12:00 (Africa/Abidjan)
Type of Contract

Temporary
Job Status

Full-time
Hours Per Week

40
Offer Starting Date

1 Oct 2024
Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme?

Not funded by an EU programme
Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?

No

Offer Description

Context:

The Fayol institute of Mines Saint-Étienne and the Laboratory of Informatics, Modeling and System Optimization (LIMOS, UMR 6158) is opening a PhD position in knowledge representation and machine learning, to work at the intersection of digital technologies and sustainable development.

The PhD proposal aims to find alternatives to Large Language Models (LLMs), characterized by a high number of trainable parameters and/or a high number of tokens in their training corpus. Using LLMs thus comes with high energy costs, in both training and inference phases, and a lack of transparency on the generated content. The objective of the PhD is to show that Knowledge Graphs such as Dbpedia, BabelNet or ConceptNet can be a solution to both problems. They have already been used in question answering tasks, despite their notable incompleteness on naive physics (basic spatial-temporal reasoning). The incompleteness of a Knowledge Graph can however be addressed by learning vector representations of the main concepts of the graph (its foundational ontology), whose geometric properties remain semantically interpretable.

Mission:

The objective of the PhD is to develop a method to train vector representations of concepts at low cost and produce a pre-trained language model from DBpedia (or similar). The pre-trained model would then be used for spatial-temporal reasoning in an industrial application, to prove the usefulness of such representations.

Activities:

Research will be conducted through bibliography management, experiment design and execution (on compute clusters), writing and presentation of results. During the PhD, the candidate will have to manage large volumes of data, use compute resources on dedicated CPUs/GPUs and develop code using machine learning libraries such as PyTorch. They will also have to apply lifecycle assessment methods to measure the environmental impact of a computation.

The PhD candidate may also help organize doctoral workshops or summer schools (with invited researchers) and attend the numerous scientific events being organized among members the Fayol institute or LIMOS.


Requirements
Research Field
Other
Education Level
Master Degree or equivalent

Skills/Qualifications

Technical skills and curriculum:

  • Master’s degree or equivalent, in the domains of computer science, data science or applied mathematics
  • Prior knowledge in:
    • machine learning and/or natual langage processing
    • formal logics and/org Semantic Web
    • (large) relational databases and/or graph databases

Other skills:

  • written and spoken English (writing of technical reports and oral presentations)
  • pratical problem solving
  • ability to generalize and formalize (mathematically)
  • autonomy, initiative and intellectual curiosity

Languages
ENGLISH
Level
Good

Languages
FRENCH
Level
Good

Additional Information
Website for additional job details

https://institutminestelecom.recruitee.com/o/doctorant-ou-doctorante-soutenabil…

Work Location(s)
Number of offers available
1
Company/Institute
MINES SAINT-ETIENNE
Country
France
State/Province
FRANCE
City
ST ETIENNE
Postal Code
42000
Street
158 cours Fauriel
Geofield


Where to apply
Website

https://institutminestelecom.recruitee.com/o/doctorant-ou-doctorante-soutenabil…

Contact
City

Saint-Étienne
Website

http://www.emse.fr/
Street

158 cours Fauriel , CS 62362
Postal Code

42023

STATUS: EXPIRED