Partially funded by the Research Council of Norway as a Centre for Research-based Innovation (SFI), iAD is the only centre of its kind led by a commercial company. iAD will be directed by Fast Search & Transfer in collaboration with Schibsted, one of Europe’s largest media companies, Accenture, and leading universities: Cornell University, University College Dublin, Dublin City University, BI Norwegian School of Management and the universities in Tromsø (UiT), Trondheim (NTNU) and Oslo (UiO).

Information access technology has emerged as one of the most innovative technology areas impacting a wide range of industries, business models and even social patterns. The iAD Centre targets core research for next generation precision, analytics and scale in the information access domain.

Due to the high profile of the iAD Centre, the right candidates must demonstrate evidence of significant research potential beyond a strong MSc degree in e.g. Computer Science. The post-doc candidates must demonstrate a proven academic track record in terms of scientific performance. The internationally distributed nature of the Centre, including partners from research and industry, requires the right candidate to have very good communication skills in English and the ability to complement in a heterogeneous team environment. Very good skills in scientific and popular presentation and writing will also be considered in employment decisions. Additional specific requirements apply for the various available positions.

The NTNU-led subproject of iAD focuses on activities to create schema agnostic indexing services. There is strong convergence in approach and principles for information access across databases, XML repositories, text search and multimedia access. Still, different design targets are predicted to enable completely different technologies and use patterns for information access.

The UiT-led subproject of iAD focuses on run-type support for next-generation, large-scale information access systems. This type of systems must be more self-managed and autonomous to be able to dynamically change their behaviour at run-time according to context and demands. Our goal is to develop a foundation of robust principles and fundamental services for the next generation infrastructure for distributed information access. This includes studying fundamental systems problems from the whole software stack. The work will be carried out with our academic partners at Cornell University, Dublin City University and University of Oslo, and our industrial partners FAST and Schibsted.

The BI-led subproject of iAD aims at business and management implications of search technology. Areas of focus include search as a disruptive innovation, and implementation and use of search technology.

The successful candidates will contribute to the iAD Centre within the group's charter of improving the resource utilization and performance of distributed systems. The focus will be the scalability of iAD's approaches to information dissemination and contributions to the development of the iAD system architecture. The project has a strong practical focus, and the candidate will generally corroborate research ideas through prototype development and practical demonstration. The work will be carried out with the academic and industrial partners in the project.