Junior Professor (tenure track) in Spoken Language Technologies

Like many areas in AI, spoken language technologies have made a major leap forward thanks to novel neural network architectures and drawing on massive amounts of training data. Applications that were beyond the state of technology ten years ago, such as live subtitling of meetings or speech-to-text translation, are now available – at least for well-resourced languages resp. language pairs. However, many challenges remain in automatic speech recognition, speech-to-text translation and spoken language understanding: dealing with far-talk sources, overlapped speech, multilingual or code-switched input, recognition for low or medium resourced languages and dialects, processing of disordered, elderly or child speech, leveraging the pragmatics captured in large language models, grounding speech in image and video... 

 

To address these challenges, we are looking for a promising candidate with a background in spoken language technology, to build the next generation of robust speech and multimodal interaction models. You perform research to robustly cope with the low-resource setting, applicable to the majority of the world’s languages and dialects. Your research field includes learning paradigms, representation learning and system architecture design, aiming to maximally leverage scarce data, exploit inaccurately labeled data, data labeled in or by another modality, interaction data…, while keeping an eye on model bias. This next generation of deployable and inclusive spoken language technology is of great economic, cultural, social, and medical benefit in a society that becomes increasingly digital. Your appointment at PSI offers ample opportunity for collaboration: within the research division, you will find top experts in machine learning, audiovisual processing, and language grounding. Since KU Leuven is a full university with reputed researchers in science, engineering, humanities, and medicine including a hospital and a strong technology transfer office, you can show impact of your fundamental and strategic work in concrete multidisciplinary use cases in industry, health, education, or humanities.

 

You will supervise PhD students in engineering science, attract competitive research funding and publish internationally in renowned journals and conferences in the stated research domain. You strive for excellence in your research, develop international collaborations within the field of the appointment and thus contribute to strengthening the scientific reputation of the department.

 

• You ensure high-quality education in the bachelor and/or master programs of the Faculty of Engineering Science or in other faculties in basic or advanced courses related to the field of research, with a clear commitment to the quality of the program as a whole. You also contribute to the pedagogical project of the faculties and the university by supervising bachelor, master and doctoral students.
• You develop your teachings in accordance with KU Leuven’s vision on activating and researched-based education and make use of the possibilities for the educationalist professionalization offered by the faculty and the university.