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One senior position is filled (thanks to several great candidates for their efforts)! But another one will open soon, and we'll keep evaluating applications. Jürgen Schmidhuber, 2007

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evolution

Senior Researcher Position at IDSIA

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job
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TUM
Possible start: 2007, with a 2 year probation period.
Salary: Commensurate with experience - roughly SFR 85,000 per year, or US$ 70,000 as of March 2007. Low taxes. There is travel funding in case of papers accepted at important conferences.

The new Senior will have big shoes to fill: Previous IDSIA Seniors include Marco Dorigo, father of the widely used Artificial Ants algorithms (working with Luca Gambardella), and Marcus Hutter, father of the asymptotically fastest algorithm for all well-defined problems.

We are seeking an outstanding researcher (professor or postdoc) with experience / interest in topics such as: sequence learning algorithms, statistical approaches to machine learning, graphical models, adaptive robotics, artificial intelligence, recurrent neural networks (RNN), sequential active vision, hidden Markov models, dynamic Bayes nets and other Bayesian approaches, universal learning machines, Kolmogorov complexity / algorithmic information theory, artificial evolution, in particular RNN evolution, support vector machines (especially recurrent ones), reinforcement learning, curiosity- driven learning.

Candidates are expected to build their own little research group by acquiring grants from Swiss or EU funding agencies.

Willingness to occasionally teach a relevant course at nearby Univ. Lugano could be a plus. The official language at IDSIA is English.

Applicants should submit as soon as possible: (i) Curriculum vitae including a list of previous grants (if any), (ii) List of three references and their email addresses, (iii) Brief statement on how their research interests fit the topics to the left.

Submit your application in plain ASCII format (plain text files!) by email to juergen@idsia.ch. Small PDF attachments are ok (but no .doc files, please). Do NOT send large files; instead send URLs. In the subject header, please mention your name and the keyword senior2007. For example, if your name is John Smith, use subject: John Smith senior2007.


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IDSIA
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IDSIA's research focuses on combinatorial optimization and artificial ants, artificial recurrent neural networks, learning robots, universal predictors and reinforcement learners, optimal universal search algorithms (e.g., Gödel machine & OOPS), complexity and generalization issues, unsupervised learning and information theory, forecasting, evolutionary computation. IDSIA is small but visible, competitive, and influential. Its algorithms hold the world records for several important operations research benchmarks (e.g., see NATURE 406(6791):39-42 for an overview of IDSIA's artificial ant algorithms). Some of IDSIA's results were reviewed not only in science journals such as Nature, Science, Scientific American, but also in the popular press, including TIME magazine, the New York Times, der SPIEGEL, and many others. IDSIA has strong ties to the TU Munich lab of cognitive robotics at TUM Computer Science.
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.

Some previous IDSIA postdocs who went on to become professors

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Einstein
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, boasts by far the most Nobel prizes per capita (350% more than the US), 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 ever, etc.
According to the Global Competitiveness Report 2006-2007 by the World Economic Forum, Switzerland is the world's most competitive country.
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Matterhorn
IDSIA is located near the beautiful city of Lugano in Ticino (pictures), the scenic southernmost province of Switzerland. Milano, Italy's center of fashion and finance, is 1 hour away, Venice 3 hours.
For decades, Switzerland has been the world's richest nation. It also got the highest ranking in the "World Database of Happiness."
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