10 new jobs in Schmidhuber's lab at IDSIA Learning Robots Cogbotlab CoTeSys: Schmidhuber's group robot population explosion Resilient machine with Continuous Self-Modeling Master in Intelligent Systems at the University of Lugano, Switzerland, in collaboration with IDSIA Statistical Robotics Best robot car so far (Dickmanns, 1995) Unsupervised Learning Juergen Schmidhuber at IDSIA Juergen Schmidhuber at TU Munich Computer Science What's new in Juergen Schmidhuber's page? Home Page of Juergen Schmidhuber Lugano, Switzerland
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2009-2010: 10 new IDSIA JOBS - 5 Postdocs & 5 PhD students in Machine Learning & Cognitive Robotics at Jürgen Schmidhuber's lab, initially for 2-3 years, with possibility of prolongation. Update of August 2011: All positions are filled!

Update of August 2010: We conducted lots of interviews at IDSIA (compare recent IDSIA seminar list) and in the US and Europe, for example, at the Singularity Summit in NYC (3-4 Oct 2009) and at the EUCogII meeting in Hamburg (10-11 Oct 2009) and at CogSys 2010 (Zurich, Jan 27-28), EUCogII 2010 (Zurich, Jan 29), and AGI 2010 in Lugano. We have filled almost all of the positions, and are proceeding much more slowly now, hoping to find just a few more additional researchers who have exactly the profile necessary to complement the already existing expertise. New applicants should file their applications under keyword sn2010. Don't hesitate to contact us if you happen to visit nearby areas and would like to stop by at IDSIA.

Original announcement: The Robot Learning Group at IDSIA is currently expanding. We are seeking 5 outstanding postdocs and 5 excellent PhD students with experience / interest in topics such as adaptive robotics, curiosity-driven learning & intrinsic motivations based on our theory of surprise and interestingness, computer vision, building 3D models from 3D scanners or from visual and other inputs, reinforcement learning & policy gradients for partially observable environments, artificial evolution, recurrent neural networks (RNN), RNN evolution, hierarchical reinforcement learning, statistical / Bayesian approaches to machine learning, statistical robotics, unsupervised learning, general artificial intelligence, universal learning machines. Goal: to improve the state of the art in adaptive robotics and machine learning in general, in both theory and practice.

Most of the funding is provided by three new EU projects, one on developmental robotics with adaptive iCub humanoids supposed to explore the world like little infants, one on learning to control artificial hands with antagonistic & stiff muscles, and another one on virtual avatars learning to act convincingly while being interviewed by humans. But all postdocs and students will interact with each other and resident IDSIAni - we are one big family! Our international project partners include neuroscientists, mathematicians, psychologists, roboticists, and other experts from Germany, the UK, Italy, Scandinavia, and the US.

Salary commensurate with experience. Postdoc ~ SFR 72,000 / year (~ US$ 91,000 / year as of 16 August 2011); PhD student ~ SFR 40,800 / year (~ US$ 51,000). Low taxes! There is travel funding in case of papers accepted at important conferences.

Start: at flexible times throughout 2009 and 2010.

Teaching? There is an opportunity to participate in teaching courses (in English) on robotics or machine learning etc. at the University of Lugano.


IDSIA was the smallest of the world's top ten AI labs listed in the 1997 "X-Lab Survey" by Business Week magazine, and ranked in fourth place in the category "Computer Science - Biologically Inspired". IDSIA's most important work was done after 1997 though. It is small but visible, competitive, and influential. For example, its highly cited Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms broke numerous benchmark records and are now widely used in industry for routing, logistics etc (today entire conferences specialize on Artificial Ants). IDSIA is also the origin of the first mathematical theory of optimal Universal Artificial Intelligence and self-referential Universal Problem Solvers (previous work on general AI was dominated by heuristics). IDSIA's artificial Recurrent Neural Networks learn to solve numerous previous unlearnable sequence processing tasks through gradient descent, Artificial Evolution and other methods. Research topics also include complexity and generalization issues, unsupervised learning and information theory, forecasting, learning robots. IDSIA's results were reviewed not only in science journals such as Nature, Science, Scientific American, but also in numerous popular press articles in TIME magazine, the New York Times, der SPIEGEL, and many others. Numerous TV shows on Tech & Science helped to popularize IDSIA's achievements.
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Instructions. Submit your CV, a brief statement of research interests, and a list of 3 references and their email addresses to cinzia@idsia.ch and juergen@idsia.ch. Do NOT send preprints or other large files; instead send URLs. In the subject header, mention your full name, the keyword eu2009, and either phd or postdoc. For example, if your name is Jo Mo, and you are applying for a PhD fellowship, use
subject: Jo Mo phd eu2009

(BTW, there are additional PhD jobs financed by USI which also may indirectly lead to supervision by JS.)


IDSIA's location: just outside the beautiful city of Lugano in Ticino (pics), the scenic southern Swiss province. Milano, Italy's center of fashion and finance, is 1 hour away, Venice 3 hours.

IDSIA is affiliated with the University of Lugano (USI) and USI's Faculty of Informatics and SUPSI. It has strong ties to the TU Munich lab of cognitive robotics at TUM Computer Science.

Check out some IDSIA alumni who went on to become profs.

Official language at IDSIA: English.

Additional jobs in the lab of JS at IDSIA: Three Postdocs and several PhD students. Older jobs (filled): 1 postdoc in biologically plausible reinforcement learning. 2 Postdocs in handwriting recognition, 1 Postdoc in medical image analysis; 1 PhD fellowship in evolutionary computation; 1 PhD student in biologically plausible reinforcement learning.


Switzerland is a good place for scientists. It is the origin of special relativity (1905) and the World Wide Web (1990), is associated with 105 Nobel laureates, and boasts far more Nobel prizes per capita than any other nation. It also has the world's highest number of publications per capita, the highest number of patents per capita, the highest citation impact factor, the most cited single-author paper, etc, etc.
As of 2009/2010, Switzerland is again the world's most competitive country, according to the World Economic Forum. It also got the highest ranking in the list of happiest countries (1990s average), according to the Happiness Foundation.
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Artificial Curiosity Reinforcement Learning SSA learns a complex task involving two agents and two keys Feedback Network Subgoal learning Evolution Evolino for time series prediction RNN-Evolution Genetic Programming Optimal Ordered Problem Solver Universal AI Goedel machine Theory of Beauty and Low- complexity Art Attentive vision Publications
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