Research Fellow

Full Time Fixed Term until 31/07/2026

The post is full-time for 12 months.

The starting date will be 1 August 2025, or as soon as possible thereafter. 

We are seeking a researcher to work on the EPSRC-funded ESPRESSO project (“Efficient Search over Personal Repositories - Secure and Sovereign”).

The post is based at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton.  The project is researching, developing and evaluating decentralised algorithms, meta-information data structures and indexing techniques to enable large-scale data search across Personal Online Datastores (pods) hosted on distributed pod servers, addressing both keyword-based search and SPARQL querying. EPRESSO will build on and extend existing frameworks and systems such as SOLID, NSS, Dataswyft/HAT, gtk-gnutella, Gaian DB. 

You will be working with Professors Thanassis Tiropanis and Adriane Chapman (University of Southampton), Professors Alexandra Poulovassilis and George Roussos (Birkbeck, University of London), as well as our partner organisations (Dataswyft and the NExT++ Centre, Singapore), the broader research community, and industry stakeholders and will be responsible for research on distributed query processing and information retrieval for text and RDF files. Experience in Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies is essential, while familiarity with approaches related to redecentralisation of the Web and testbed development is highly desirable. This research will also involve the use of benchmarks and the generation of synthetic datasets for experimentation in the domain on health and wellbeing. In addition, the post will involve administrative tasks associated with the running of the project and the requirements of our funders.

It is essential that you have a PhD in computer science, or equivalent professional qualifications and experience; ideally your PhD or equivalent professional qualifications and experience will be in distributed database systems, information retrieval, computer networking or semantic web.  

The post does not involve working outside of the UK for over 30 days in a row or over 90 days in a year.

For further information please contact Thanassis Tiropanis (email t.tiropanis@soton.ac.uk)

*Applications will be considered from candidates who are working towards or nearing completion of a relevant PhD qualification.  The title of Research Fellow will be applied upon completion of PhD.  Prior to the qualification being awarded the title of Senior Research Assistant will be given. 

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