24 July: fyi -- PhD funding, UK
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*** RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES ***
*** Post-Doctoral Research Associates and PhD Students ***
Lancaster University
( http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ )
and
The Open University, UK
( http://www.computing.open.ac.uk/ )
"MaTREx - Making Tacit Knowledge in Requirements Explicit"
Positions based in Lancaster and Milton Keynes, UK
Duration: 3 years, starting 1st October 2008
The Departments of Computing at Lancaster University and The Open
University (OU) have recently been awarded research funds by the UK
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to
investigate the role of tacit knowledge in requirements.
*** Project Overview:
The MaTREx project will investigate techniques for analysing natural
language requirements, in order to discover, manage, and mitigate the
negative effects of tacit knowledge in requirements. Tacit knowledge is
knowledge that we know we have but can't articulate, or knowledge that
we don't know that we have but nevertheless use. We rely on tacit
knowledge to communicate effectively: we need not make every assumption
we hold explicit, allowing us to focus on the essence of what we wish to
communicate. As engineers concerned with the development of software and
systems, however, we are taught to make our assumptions explicit, and
indeed any kind of knowledge that is not made explicit makes our systems
analysis more difficult and error prone. This problem is particularly
acute during requirements engineering (RE), when knowledge about the
problem world and stakeholder requirements is elicited, and precise
specifications of system structure and behaviour are developed.
Requirements are often first communicated in natural language, and are
often ambiguous, incomplete, and inevitably full of undocumented
assumptions and other omissions. Effective analysis of such requirements
needs to surface this tacit knowledge automatically or
semi-automatically where possible to document more precise requirements
that can be relied upon by stakeholders to communicate effectively.
We will adopt an empirical approach to characterise and elicit tacit
knowledge, and a constructive, theoretically-grounded but user-driven
approach to develop practical techniques and tools to guide analysts
concerned with the development of precise requirements for
software-intensive systems.
The results of our work will comprise tools and techniques for:
improving the management of requirements information through automatic
trace recovery; discovering the presence of tacit knowledge from the
tracking of presuppositions and unprovenanced requirements; and the
detection of nocuous ambiguity in requirements documents that imply
potential for misinterpretation.
*** Research Positions on the project are available for:
* Post doctoral software engineering researchers with an interest in the
handling of natural language requirements using techniques from
computational linguistics and information retrieval;
* Post doctoral computational linguistics researchers with an interest
in applications in software engineering;
* Recent graduates with a First Class Honours degree (or equivalent) in
Computing, Software Engineering, or related disciplines.
We welcome informal enquiries. Please contact Bashar Nuseibeh
by 30th July 2008. Instructions on how to apply
formally will follow.
---------------------------------
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
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