Εργαστήριο Γνώσης και Αβεβαιότητας

Knowledge and Uncertainty Research Laboratory

Developer for INSPIRE digital library


As part of their cooperation in science and technology, CERN and the University of Peloponnese are searching for a software developer for the INSPIRE digital library. The successful candidate will become a member of ΓΑΒ LAB and will be based at CERN in Switzerland. The appointment is initially for one year, renewable up to a total of three years.


INSPIRE is the digital library of the High-Energy Physics community. It serves scientific information about over 1 million scientific artefacts: articles, preprints, theses, conference proceedings and increasingly data and software. It is searched on average more than twice per second. INSPIRE is developed and operated at CERN, with contributions from laboratories in China, Germany, and the United States. Partners in France and Japan also collaborate to curate information. Beyond its role as a digital library, INSPIRE disambiguates author names and attributes to individual researchers their scientific production, with about 100'000 profiles built, through a mix of machine learning, crowdsourcing and manual curation. INSPIRE also provides community services such as user contributed popular lists of job opportunities and upcoming conferences.


INSPIRE is developed on top of the Invenio open source digital library software. The operation of INSPIRE service relies on a complex workflow identifying and harvesting content from a hundred multiple sources (scientific publishers as well as other community services such as arXiv.org). This information is then promptly enriched and automatically linked with existing INSPIRE content and cross-referenced to external services. Users also can suggest additional content to INSPIRE, as well as improvements and corrections, a service which will grow in the next months.


INSPIRE is currently being fully re-implemented on top of a modern software stack, based on Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, AngularJS, Bootstrap, Elasticsearch, and Scikit-Learn. As part of this process there is an opportunity for a software engineer to help integrating and consolidating existing and new code and sub-projects across all layers: from operations, to back-end development; from front-end design to UI implementation. The candidate would join a dynamic and agile team of both junior and senior developers, collaborating with content curators at CERN and across the entire INSPIRE partnership.

Eligibility conditions

Recent graduate from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Peloponnese.

Technical Skills

  • Web development: Python
  • Python web framework (preferably Flask, or Django)
  • Javascript (preferably AngularJS (1 or 2), and Bootstrap)
  • SQLAlchemy ORM
  • Elasticsearch
  • Scikit-learn (optional)
  • Redis and Celery (optional)

How to Apply

Please send a CV and a letter of motivation to ΓΑΒ LAB by September 17th 2017. Applications with links to code samples will be given priority. Applications will be reviewed by UoP's commitee, consisting of Manolis Wallace, Costas Vassilakis and George Lepouras. Shortlisted candidates will be interviewed remotely by the end of September 2017. The final selection and decision will be made by CERN.


The start date for the successful candidate will be by November 2017.


All questions regarding this post should be also addressed to ΓΑΒ LAB.