Employment opportunities, postdoctoral positions, summer jobs

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Research Scientist on Natural Language Processing

Employer: IBM Research Ireland
Title: Research Scientist
Specialty: NLP, Machine Learning
Location: Dublin
Deadline: May 5th, 2016
Date posted: April 11th, 2016
Contact: link to application page

Ireland is accepting applications for full-time researchers in the area of natural language processing. The ideal candidate will have a PhD degree in computational linguistics or in computer science with a specialisation in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Prior experience in the area of text analytics with information extraction, information retrieval and machine learning are highly desirable, and experience with corpus linguistics or natural language understanding are a plus. Strong programming skills in Java are required.

The successful research candidate must have demonstrated ability to define research plans, carry out leading research, and publish research results through professional journals, academic conferences, and patents. As a researcher you will be expected to organize challenging problems, develop new solutions, and work with business & development teams to ensure these solutions have a significant impact.

Postdoc Researcher on Vision and Language

Employer: University of Liverpool
Title: Postdoc
Specialty: Computer Vision with an interest in human vision/language behaviour
Location: Liverpool UK
Deadline: April 20th, 2016
Date posted: March 28, 2016
Contact: link to application page

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research associate position to study the relationship between visual/spatial representations and language. Language is often used to describe the visual world and this is done by labelling objects in the world with various categories such as roles (e.g., agent, goal). There is now a large infant social cognition literature which shows how categories like agents and goals may be identified using simple visual heuristics. In this post, we will strengthen these links by experimentally manipulating visual cues to see how they influence language choices in adults and children. In addition to the experimental study of these links, we will also develop computational models that use computer vision techniques to track the interaction of objects in videos and link these visual codes to the descriptions of the actions. We are most interested in people with a computational background who have an interest in human vision/language processing.

This post offers the opportunity to join a thriving research group at the University of Liverpool and become a member of the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LUCID, http://www.lucid.ac.uk/), a multi-million pound collaboration between the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and Lancaster. You should have (or be about to obtain) a PhD in the field related to Computer Science, Psychology, Cognitive Science, or related disciple. The post is available for 3 years.

Postdoc Positions at Johns Hopkins University

Employer: Johns Hopkins University
Title: Postdoc
Specialty: NLP, Machine Learning, Social media analysis for computational social science, health/medicine
Location: Baltimore, MD
Deadline: March 31, 2016
Date posted: March 1, 2016
Contact: http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/employment-opportunities/

The Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) at the Johns Hopkins University seeks applicants for postdoctoral fellowship positions in speech and language processing, including the areas of natural language processing, machine learning and health informatics. Applicants must have a Ph.D. in a relevant discipline and a strong research record.

The center has a number of postdoctoral positions available for the coming year. Possible research topics include:

Trend Detection in Social Media
Broadly Multilingual Learning of Morphology
Stochastic approximation algorithms for subspace and multi-view representation learning
Analysis of large-scale time series data in healthcare

Host faculty include: Mark Dredze, David Yarowsky, Jason Eisner, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Benjamin Van Durme, Raman Arora, Suchi Saria

Associate/Full Professor in Computational Linguistics at Stony Brook University

Employer: Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University
Title: Associate/Full Professor
Specialty: Computational Linguistics
Location: New York, USA
Deadline: ~~March 14, 2016~~ May 1, 2016
Date posted: February 17, 2015
LinguistList Announcement: http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-861.html
Contact: Lori Repetti lori.repetti@stonybrook.edu

Job Description

The Department of Linguistics at Stony Brook University invites applications for a tenured appointment in computational linguistics, beginning Fall 2016 or Fall 2017. This is a senior appointment at the Associate or Full Professor level.

The successful candidate will have a PhD (preferably in Linguistics or Computer Science), an outstanding research profile in Computational Linguistics (ideally in areas that complement existing departmental strengths), a strong track record in grant acquisition, and teaching and advising experience at the graduate and/or undergraduate levels.

They will also be expected to

Contribute to the ongoing development of the Department's degree programs in linguistics and computational linguistics,
Initiate new collaborations and expand existing ones with other computational research groups on campus, in particular in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science,
Strengthen the department's connections with the local IT industry.

Salary will be commensurate with education and experience.

Application

Applications must be submitted via AcademicJobsOnline: https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/6983

Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Employer: Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)
Title: Research Scientist
Specialties (one or more): Natural language processing, machine reading, automatic knowledge base construction, large-scale textual inference and entailment, knowledge representation and reasoning, question answering and explanation
Location: Seattle, WA
Deadline: N/A, we are hiring throughout 2016
Date posted: 02/09/2016
Contact information: ai2-info@allenai.org
Website: http://allenai.org/jobs.html

Job Description

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) is a non-profit research institute in Seattle founded by Paul Allen and headed by Professor Oren Etzioni. The core mission of (AI2) is to contribute to humanity through high-impact AI research and engineering. We are actively seeking Research Scientists at all levels who are passionate about AI and who can help us achieve this core mission by teaming to construct AI systems with reasoning, learning and reading capabilities.

Position Summary

AI2 currently has projects in the following areas:

Language and Vision
Information extraction and semantic parsing
Question answering
Language and reasoning
Machine learning and theory formation
Semantic search
Natural language processing
Diagram understanding
Visual knowledge extraction and visual reasoning

And more….

AI2 Research Scientists will have a primary focus in one of these specific areas but will also have the opportunity to contribute and engage in a variety of other areas critical to our research and mission. These include opportunities to participate in or lead select R&D projects, work with management to develop the long term vision for knowledge systems R&D, take a leading role in overseeing and implementing software systems supporting AI2’s research, author and present scientific papers and presentations for peer-reviewed journals and conferences, and help develop collaborative and strategic relationships with relevant academic, industrial, government, and standards organizations.

Applicant

Applicants for Research Scientist at AI2 should have a strong foundation (typically PhD level) in one or more of the following areas: natural language processing, machine reading, automatic knowledge base construction, large-scale textual inference and entailment, knowledge representation and reasoning, computer vision and machine learning, or question answering and explanation. We look favorably upon extensive work experience and publishing demonstrating application of your research.

Why AI2

In addition to AI2’s core mission of being a leader in the field of AI research, we also aim to create a superb team environment and to invest in each team member’s personal development. Some highlights are:

We are a learning organization – because everything AI2 does is ground-breaking, we are learning every day. Similarly, through weekly AI2 Academy lectures, a wide variety of world-class AI experts as guest speakers, and our commitment to your personal on-going education, AI2 is a place where you will have opportunities to continue learning right alongside us;
We value diversity of thought – we seek Research Scientists who can bring novel experiences and modes of problem solving to our leading-edge mission. If you are creative and efficient in your approach and insightful in your questioning, AI2 could be a great environment for you;
We emphasize a healthy work/life balance – we believe our team members are happiest and most productive when their work/life balance is optimized. While we value powerful research results which drive our mission forward, we also value dinner with family, weekend time, and vacation time. We offer generous paid vacation and sick leave as well as family leave;
We are collaborative and transparent – we consider ourselves a team, all moving with a common purpose. We are quick to cheer our successes, and even quicker to share and jointly problem solve our failures;
We are in Seattle – and our office is on the water! We have mountains, we have lakes, we have four seasons, we bike to work, we have a vibrant theater scene, we have the defending Super Bowl champions, and we have so much else. We even have kayaks for you to paddle right outside our front door;
We are friendly – chances are you will like every one of the 30+ (and growing!) people who work here. We do!

Application Process

Visit our website for more information: http://allenai.org/jobs.html

Software Engineer - Machine Learning / NLP (Chinese) at SYSTRAN

Employer: SYSTRAN
Title: Software Engineer
Topics: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation
Location: San Diego
Deadline: Open until filled
Date Posted: January 29, 2016
Contact: Apply directly at https://recruit.systrangroup.com/recruit/Portal.na

SYSTRAN is currently seeking an experienced Software Engineer specializing in Machine Learning / NLP to join our R&D team in San Diego to develop machine translation systems.

The ideal candidate must have a combination of research and implementation skills, including significant programming experience. Hands-on experience with machine learning, including deep neural network, text classification, statistical techniques for NLP or a related field, is highly desirable.

Responsibilities include software development, experimentation, analysis of results, and building systems that combine linguistics and statistical language models for machine translation centering on Chinese language.

Key Qualifications

Knowledge of natural language processing field, including but not limited to, formal grammar, syntactic parsing and morphology
Good algorithmic knowledge of machine learning
Experience writing and debugging software
Strong communications skills
Ability to work well as part of a team
Fluent in English.
Fluent in Chinese is a plus

Education and Experience

MS or Ph D in Computational Linguistics / Computer Science or relevant field.
2+ years work experience preferred

Benefits

Successful candidates will be offered a competitive salary based on their qualifications and experience.

Vacancy for Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Reader at University of Dundee

Employer: University of Dundee
Title: Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Reader
Topics: Computational Linguistics, Language, Argumentation, Artificial Intelligence
Location: Dundee, UK
Deadline: 27 February 2016
Date Posted: 12 January 2016
Contact: Prof. Chris Reed (see http://arg.tech/lecturer)

£34,576 to £55,389 Full Time, Permanent

The University of Dundee’s School of Science & Engineering is advertising several permanent posts including one covering the Centre for Argument Technology. We are particularly keen to receive applications from candidates in Computational Linguistics to expand the group’s research in Argument Mining (see http://argmining2016.arg.tech and http://arg.tech/am), but welcome applications in all areas of the overlap between argumentation and artificial intelligence. A strong publication profile is essential, and for more senior appointments, so is a track record of funding success.

For further information about the Centre for Argument Technology, please see http://arg.tech or contact Prof. Chris Reed; for more information about the position, see http://arg.tech/lecturer. General details follow.

Summary of Job Purpose and Principal Duties

The University of Dundee is seeking an exceptional candidate to join one of our Computing research groups, based within the School of Science and Engineering. The successful candidate will develop new research lines within either the (i) Human Centred Computing Group; (ii) the Centre for Argument Technology; or (iii) the Space Technology Centre. Full information on the current research in each group can be found in the Further Particulars.

The successful candidate is expected to have a strong track record of research and a clear research plan that articulates with (or expands significantly) one of these areas. They will be expected to contribute to the development of research in this area by publishing in the highest quality journals and attracting appropriate research funding. For appointments at Grade 8 and 9, candidates are expected to show evidence of having attracted independent funding. The School encourages applications from holders of personal Fellowships.

Additionally, the successful candidate will be expected to take an active role in the teaching of undergraduate computing programmes as well as supporting teaching at Masters level.

Job Summary

The appointee will be expected to contribute to research in Computing and to teaching and administration within the School of Science and Engineering. They will be expected to:

Contribute to the ongoing research in one of the three research groups described above.
Contribute to the generation of external research funding.
Publish in high quality research journals and major international conferences.
Teach at undergraduate and post-graduate level.
Supervise students at all levels (honours and MSc projects, PhD).
Undertake administrative duties.

Application Requirements

In addition to the online form, applicants must include with their application:

Cover letter outlining fit to role.
Research plan (1-2 pages) covering proposed research over the first three years of the appointment.
Teaching plan (1-2 pages) outlining fit to current teaching at Dundee and teaching methodology.

Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Models of Reasoning / Intelligence Systems Section at AI Center / US Naval Research Laboratory

Employer: US Naval Research Laboratory
Title: Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Topics: Reasoning, Computational Modeling, Language, Artificial Intelligence
Location: Washington, DC
Deadline: Open until filled
Date Posted: January 20, 2016
Contact: Sunny Khemlani (sunny.khemlani@nrl.navy.mil)

Research focus: The Postdoctoral Fellow will collaborate on various projects in reasoning, including (but not limited to) building a unified computational framework of reasoning; investigating how people engage in explanatory reasoning; and testing a system that reasons about time and temporal relations.

Supervisor: Sunny Khemlani, PhD

Key qualifications: A Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, or computer science, with experience in higher level cognition, experimental design and data analysis, or cognitive modeling. Experience with theories of reasoning, computer programming, and cognitive modeling is a strong plus.

Length of appointment: This position is for one year with second and third year reappointment dependent on satisfactory performance.

Program and compensation: The Fellowship operates through the NRC Research Associateship Program (http://sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/rap/). Only US citizenship or green card holders are eligible for the program. Fellows are compensated through a research stipend of ~$75,000/year.

To apply: Send a cover letter and CV to Dr. Sunny Khemlani at sunny.khemlani@nrl.navy.mil.

Internship positions available at Juji, Inc.

Employer: Juji, Inc.
Title: Intern
Location: Saratoga, CA
Deadline: open until all the positions are filled
Date Posted: January 14, 2016

Description: Have you ever watched the movie Her? Have you ever wondered or wished to have a virtual partner just like Samantha, who could tell you what you really are, whom your best partner may be, and even cheers you up? At Juji, we are building a hyper-personalized, virtual REP (Responsible, Empathetic Pal) for everyone. Your REP not only understands who you are, including your personality, motivations, and strengths, but it can also chat with you to learn and help fulfill your certain needs.

We are seeking highly motivated and talented students, who are eager to help us tackle great technical challenges at Juji and to expand their knowledge and skills in the real world. We are especially interested in students who have had worked or love to work in the following areas: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing/Natural Language Generation, Machine Learning, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualization/Visual Analytics, and Cognitive Science.

We have multiple positions on two main tracks:

Software development. If you love to create amazing software technologies and systems for real users, this is the track for you. You are expected to own and deliver a relatively independent project that will contribute to our cutting-edge product development effort.

Scientific research. If you love to design and conduct scientific experiments to answer a specific set of research questions, this is the track for you. You will work on a government funded research project on understanding human trust in a digital environment. You are expected to play a critical role in designing and conducting novel research studies and writing papers that lead to scientific publications.

Qualifications Outstanding current students towards a bachelor or higher degree in the area of Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent disciplines are encouraged to apply. Strong software development or visual design skills are a plus.

To apply: Please email a copy of your resume to the following address: jobs@juji-inc.com with a subject line “Summer Internship 2016”, and state your track preference in your email body.

Postdoctoral Fellow in Natural Language Processing / AI at Brigham and Women's Hospital / Harvard Medical School

Employer: Brigham and Women's Hospital / Harvard Medical School
Title: Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Topics: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Predictive Modeling
Location: Boston, MA
Deadline: Open until filled
Date Posted: January 8, 2016
Contact: Alexander Turchin (aturchin@bwh.harvard.edu)

Research focus: the Fellow will work in a multi-disciplinary team of artificial intelligence scientists, informaticians, biostatisticians, and clinicians on projects involving development of high-dimensional predictive models in medicine. The models will be based on data from a large integrated healthcare system and will utilize a combination of artificial intelligence and natural language processing of multiple narrative document streams.

Supervisor: Alexander Turchin, MD, MS, FACMI

Required skills: experience with natural language processing; ability to design and conduct effective research studies; strong analytical, scientific writing, presentation and communication skills; strong programming and system development skills. Experience with artificial intelligence technologies, predictive modeling, Big Data and medical terminologies / ontologies is a strong plus.

Education: PhD in computer science, biomedical informatics, linguistics, or a related discipline; MD or an equivalent degree.

Length of appointment: This position is for one year with second and third year reappointment dependent on satisfactory performance and availability of funding.

Available: Immediately.

Compensation: according to NIH (NRSA) stipend levels.

To apply: send cover letter and CV to Dr. Alexander Turchin at aturchin@bwh.harvard.edu.

Internship positions available in Natural Language Processing at Adobe Research

Employer: Adobe Systems Incorporated
Title: NLP Scientist Intern
Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Question Answering and Dialog Systems.
Location: San Jose, CA
Deadline: open until all the positions are filled
Date Posted: December 23, 2015
Trung Bui: bui@adobe.com

Description: We are looking for several NLP scientist interns who will work on semantic understanding, question answering and dialog systems to improve Adobe digital media and digital marketing products. The internship will be at the Medial Intelligence Lab under the Imagination Lab at Adobe Research (http://www.adobe.com/technology.html) located in San Jose, California. It is 13 weeks long and can start any time from March 1, 2016.

Key Qualifications

Experience with semantic parsing, question answering and dialog systems.
Experience with machine learning, deep learning.
Good programming skills in Java/C++ and/or Python

Education M.S. or PhD student in Computer Science or related field

Additional Requirements No.

Associate Research Scientist at UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt

Employer: UKP Lab, Department of Computer Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt
Title: Associate Research Scientist
Speciality: Natural Language Processing
Location: Darmstadt, Germany
Deadline: January 15, 2016
Date posted: December 23, 2015
Contact: jobs@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de

The Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab at the Department of Computer Science, Technische Universität (TU) Darmstadt, Germany has an opening for an Associate Research Scientist (PostDoc- or PhD-level; for an initial term of two years) to strengthen the group's profile in the area of Computational Argumentation. The UKP Lab is a research group comprising over 30 team members who work on various aspects of Natural Language Processing (NLP), of which Computational Argumentation is one of the rapidly developing focus areas in collaboration with industrial partners.

We ask for applications from candidates in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Information Technology, or Computational Linguistics, preferably with expertise in research and development projects, and strong communication skills in English and German. The successful applicant will work in projects including research activities in the area of computational argumentation (e.g. automatic evidence detection, decision support, large-scale web mining on heterogeneous source and data management), and development activities to create new products or industrial product prototypes. Prior work in the above areas is a definite advantage. Ideally, the candidates should have demonstrable experience in designing and implementing complex (NLP) systems in Java and experience in information retrieval, large-scale data processing and machine learning. In particular, experience with deep-learning is a strong plus. Combining fundamental NLP research on Computational Argumentation with industrial applications from different application domains will be highly encouraged.

UKP's wide cooperation network both within its own research community and with partners from industry provides an excellent environment for the position to be filled. The Department of Computer Science of TU Darmstadt is regularly ranked among the top ones in respective rankings of German universities. Its unique research initiative "Knowledge Discovery in the Web" and the recently established Research Training Group "Adaptive Information Processing of Heterogeneous Content" (AIPHES) funded by the DFG emphasizes NLP, text mining, machine learning, as well as scalable infrastructures for the assessment and aggregation of knowledge. UKP Lab is a highly dynamic research group committed to high-quality research results, technologies of the highest industrial standards, cooperative work style and close interaction of team members working on common goals.

Applications should include a detailed CV, a motivation letter and an outline of previous working or research experience (if available).

Applications from women are particularly encouraged. All other things being equal, candidates with disabilities will be given preference. Please send the application to: jobs@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de by 15 January 2016. The position is open until filled. Later applications may be considered if the position is still open.

Postdoctoral Researcher position in NLP/Computational Social Science at UPenn

Employer: Computer & Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Title: Postdoctoral Researcher
Speciality: Natural Language Processing, Computational Social Science
Location: Philadelphia, USA
Deadline: January 15, 2016
Date posted: December 21, 2015
Contact: applications@wwbp.org

We invite applicants for a postdoctoral research position in natural language processing for health and social science, working on an interdisciplinary research project studying subjective well-being and health outcomes. The researcher will help develop state-of-the-art methods and models to better understand people, such as predicting personality from the words they use and automatically recognizing cognitive distortions typical of people prone to depression.

The ideal candidate will have research experience in computational linguistics and applied machine learning. She or he will develop and code novel methods to leverage large datasets (i.e. billions of tweets) and use them to further our understanding of health, well-being, and the psychological states of individuals and large populations. Methods and results will be published in high impact computer science venues and, via collaboration with psychologists and medical doctors, in social science and health venues. See wwbp.org for example publications.

Application Deadline: January 15, 2015
Approximate Start Date: March 1, 2016 (but flexible)

How to Apply: Send a detailed CV with at least 2 references who can be contacted for letters to applications@wwbp.org. Include job-code “POSTDOC-CS” in subject line.

The University of Pennsylvania is an EOE/Affirmative Action Employer. Position contingent on funding.

Primary Contact: Professor Lyle Ungar, ungar@cis.upenn.edu

Multiple positions as Full-time researcher, Post-doc researcher, Software Engineer and Summer Intern in IBM Research - Almaden, San Jose

Employer: IBM Research - Almaden
Title: Researcher, Software Engineer, Post-doc, Summer Intern
Speciality: natural language processing, information integration, entity resolution, machine learning, ontologies, and large-scale data management
Location: San Jose, CA
Deadline: (until filled)
Date posted: December 18, 2015
Contact: Laura Chiticariu (chiti {at} us.ibm.com) and/or Lucian Popa (lpopa {at} us.ibm.com)

IBM Research - Almaden is looking for researchers to join the Natural Language Processing, Entity Resolution and Discovery Department. Our research focuses around creating a knowledge engineering platform for the creation, maintenance and consumption of “industry-specific” knowledge bases from a large number of (un/semi)structured public, licensed and enterprise content sources. Such a platform needs to support the entire lifecycle for knowledge engineering including:

creation, maintenance and evolution of ontologies to capture domain concepts of interest
scalable systems, tools and methodologies to support the development of individual analytic stages involved in creating knowledge from multiple sources such as text analytics, entity resolution and integration, cleansing, data transformations and machine learning; supporting domain adaptability and easy-to-use interfaces for key user personae for the individual analytic stages
scalable content services infrastructure that enables production-level deployment of these analytic workflows with support for continuous monitoring, introspection and recovery in the knowledge base creation process
techniques and methods for scalable and flexible indexing and querying support over the knowledge base supporting structured and search style queries, entity queries, as well as ad-hoc and exploratory queries
easy-to-use knowledge consumption interfaces for both human and machine consumption including support for discovery and ad-hoc NLQ driven interfaces
incorporating crowd sourcing and continuous evolution of the system through learning from user interactions.

The research builds upon and extends successful projects from our group, which have resulted in academic, industrial and open source impact:

The research is being conducted in close collaboration with the IBM Watson Solutions division and multiple global IBM Research labs (India, Haifa and Zurich), with focus around demonstrating scalable knowledge base construction in multiple industry domains (e.g., Healthcare, Financial and consumer domains). We are currently looking for researchers (Research Staff Members, software engineers, post-doc researchers and summer interns) with interest & experience in one or more areas relevant to the knowledge engineering life cycle such as natural language processing, information integration, entity resolution, machine learning, ontologies, and large-scale data management, as described above.

Please send your resumes to: Laura Chiticariu (chiti {at} us.ibm.com) and/or Lucian Popa (lpopa {at} us.ibm.com)

Two Postdoc Opportunities at the US Army Research Lab in the Washington, DC Metro Area

Employer: US Army Research Laboratory
Title: Postdoctoral Fellow
Speciality: Knowledge Representation, Knowledge Bases, Common-Sense Reasoning, Planning
Location: Adelphi, MD
Deadline: (until filled)
Date posted: November 30, 2015
Contact: douglas.a.summers-stay.civ@mail.mil and/or ethan.a.stump2.civ@mail.mil

The US Army Research Laboratory currently has two postdoc opportunities:

Position #1

The US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) is researching common-sense reasoning and natural language understanding for the purpose of creating a communication dialogue to promote increased intent understanding within Human-Robot teams. In support of this effort, ARL is looking for an individual with a PhD or equivalent, with interest and a background in knowledge representation, knowledge bases, knowledge graphs, common-sense reasoning, or spatial reasoning. We plan to make use of semantic vector spaces to enhance the capabilities of the reasoning system, so some familiarity with knowledge graph embedding, distributional semantic vector spaces (such as GloVe or word2vec), or learning from massive text corpora would also be beneficial.

The position is available immediately with a duty location at the Adelphi Laboratory Center (ALC), Adelphi, MD.

To learn more about the position, or to apply, please send questions or a CV to Dr. Douglas Summers-Stay via email at douglas.a.summers-stay.civ@mail.mil.

Position #2

The US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) is seeking a Postdoctoral Researcher to bridge the gap between humans and autonomous systems by developing a controlled language to reason and communicate about human intent as it applies to commands a robot receives. In robotics, practitioners often program autonomous systems by developing monolithic behaviors that, when correctly parameterized, will cause the system to act as desired. However, setting these parameters is often more art than science, and we cannot expect an average user to effectively task the system unless they have only the simplest tasks in mind. ARL desires a controlled language that both concisely describes the capabilities of autonomous systems, as well as enables common-sense reasoning and representation of implicit goals that will let the system fill instructional gaps from novice users.

In this position, the Researcher will work on a cross-disciplinary team comprised of researchers in computational linguistics, computer vision, machine learning, and experimental robotics to develop a system for interacting with humans—the goal being to develop and evolve complex plans carried out by autonomous systems. The primary responsibilities of the Researcher will be learning how we can use language to link the domains of intent reasoning and action, and developing such a language to enable experiments with humans and robot teams operating in dynamic environments.

The candidate must have a PhD or equivalent degree, and should have an interest and background in formal methods, knowledge representation and reasoning, computational linguistics, control policies, or AI planning.