JOBS FOR PHD STUDENTS & POSTDOCS 2016
Update of Oct 7: Most positions are filled, but one postdoc position is still open - closes Oct 31!
Are you interested in continual reinforcement learning (RL) in
realistic environments
where traditional RL (for board games etc) does not work well,
where we need some sort of
search for programs
running on general purpose computers
such as
recurrent neural networks
(RNNs), and where a good RL machine should learn to plan and reason in
hierarchical
and other abstract ways?
Join the
Deep Learning team (since 1991) that
won more competitions than any other.
We are seeking PhD students and postdocs for
Jürgen Schmidhuber's research group at the
Swiss AI Lab IDSIA,
for the
RNNAIssance Project based on arXiv:1511.09249 on "learning to think." It is about general purpose
artificial intelligence
for agents living in partially observable environments, controlled by reinforcement learning RNNs, supported by
unsupervised
predictive RNN world models. Our first papers on such RL control systems based on two interacting
RNNs date back to
1990 and
1991,
but now, a quarter century later, finally we
know how to do it right.
(You will also
collaborate with other lab members on other projects -
we are one big family!)
Duration: initially for 2 years, with possibility of prolongation.
We are looking for outstanding candidates
with experience / interest in topics such as
deep learning neural networks,
RNNs and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM),
evolutionary computation,
RNN evolution,
compressed network search,
reinforcement learning & policy gradients
for partially observable environments,
unsupervised learning,
curiosity-driven learning and the Formal Theory of Fun & Creativity,
adaptive robotics,
hierarchical reinforcement learning,
general
artificial intelligence,
universal learning machines.
The general goal is to advance the state of the art in machine learning and AI.
Preferred start: As soon as possible.
INSTRUCTIONS: Submit your CV, a brief statement of
why you'd like to work with us on such topics, and a list of 3 references and their
email addresses to rnnai2016@idsia.ch.
In the subject header,
mention your full name followed by the keyword rnnai2016. (Add "PhD" in case of PhD students.
For example, if your name is Jo Mo, and you are applying as a PhD student,
use subject: Jo Mo rnnai2016 PhD)
As a PhD student, you must also submit your material to SUPSI through
THIS ONLINE FORM (now closed).
As a postdoc, you must also submit your material to SUPSI through
THIS ONLINE FORM (open again until Oct 31).
PhD student salary: Initially CHF 46'000 per year (>US$ 46k as of 21 Oct 2016).
Standard postdoc salary: CHF 80'000 per year (>US$ 80k as of 21 Oct).
Low Swiss taxes. There is travel funding in case of papers accepted at important conferences.
There are also exciting connections to the world of AI startups.
There is an opportunity to
participate in teaching courses (in English) on machine learning, e.g.,
in the master's program
at the University of Lugano.
Requirements are also published within the "Direttive interne SUPSI" (direttiva 7A, Art. 2) and within "Regolamento del personale SUPSI" on the website www.supsi.ch (follow SUPSI, Documenti ufficiali).
Official language at
IDSIA is
English.
(Filled: one additional 4-month PhD student position in the Prototouch project with this online form.)
The Swiss AI Lab 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, it
won many international pattern recognition competitions.
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. In particular,
IDSIA's LSTM RNNs are now available to billions of smartphone users, e.g., for
speech recognition.
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.
IDSIA is affiliated with
the University of Lugano (USI)
and USI's Faculty of Informatics
and SUPSI.
Many IDSIA alumni went on to become professors. Google
DeepMind is heavily influenced by our former students: DeepMind's first PhDs in AI and Machine Learning came from our lab, one of them co-founder, one of them first employee; others joined later.
IDSIA is located 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.
Switzerland is the world's leading science nation.
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 with over 1m population.
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 2016, Switzerland is the world's most
competitive country for the 7th year in a row, according to the World Economic Forum. It's also the
happiest country (1990s average), according to the Happiness Foundation.
More.
.
|