The Socio-technical Data Analytics (SODA) research group at the iSchool at Illinois conducts research on how to design, develop, and evaluate new technologies in order to better understand the dynamic interplay between information, people and technology. The group has recently introduced a new SODA specialization and is actively recruiting outstanding MS and PhD students in the areas of information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, network analysis, text and data mining, knowledge discovery and informetrics.
The application process is competitive and research assistantships will be assigned to the most qualified applicants only after admission to the MS or PhD programs. Successful PhD applicants will receive up to 4 years of funding, including tuition waivers, stipends and benefits. Successful MS applicants will receive 1 year of funding including tuition waivers, stipends and benefits. Funded research assistantships provide students with increased opportunities to work closely with the following faculty:
- Catherine Blake (text mining, discovery and health informatics, summarization),
- Jana Diesner (NLP, machine learning, network analysis, covert information),
- Miles Efron (information retrieval, language technologies, temporal information),
- Vetle Torvik (informetrics, data mining, literature-based discovery, name disambiguation).
The Graduate School of Library and information Science supports a broad range of interdisciplinary research in areas such as youth services, user services and outreach, information history and policy, social and community informatics, data curation, and information organization. More information about available fellowships can be found at soda.lis.illinois.edu and questions can be directed to sodaInfo@illinois.edu. General Admissions questions can be directed to LISapply@illinois.edu. Students from historically and statistically underrepresented groups are particularly encouraged to apply.
Rolling deadlines are available for the MS program and the deadline for PhD applications is December 15, 2012.