IDSIA JOB: PhD IN EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATIOON / NEUROEVOLUTION

JOB: Faustino Gomez is offering a PhD position in Evolutionary Computation at IDSIA. THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED

We are seeking an outstanding PhD student with interest in the followin topics: evolutionary computation (genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, estimation algorithms, etc.), evolutionary reinforcement learning, neuroevolution (evolution of neural network, especially recurrent neural networks), co-evolution, linkage learning, fitness estimation, evolutionary ensemble methods, multi-objective evolution. Goal: to advance the state of the art in artificial evolution, and to solve challenging reinforcement learning tasks.
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IDSIA is located just outside the beautiful city of Lugano in Ticino (pics), the scenic southern Swiss province.

Milano, Italy's center of fashion, design and finance, is 1 hour away, Venice 3 hours.

The official language at IDSIA is English.

Check out some previous IDSIA postdocs who went on to become profs

INSTRUCTIONS: submit your CV, a list of 3 references and their email addresses, and a statement of relevant research interests, to cinzia@idsia.ch and tino@idsia.ch. Do NOT send large files; instead send URLs. In the subject header, mention your name and the keyword evo2008. For example, if your name is Jim Rockford, use
subject: Jim Rockford evo2008. Submissions not adhering to this format will not be considered.

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.
Switzerland also got the highest ranking in the list of happiest countries.

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.
IDSIA has strong ties to the TU Munich lab of cognitive robotics at TUM Computer Science.

IDSIA is small but visible, competitive, and influential. For example, its 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.