Junior Professor (tenure track) in Spoken Language Technologies
2024-07-02
Leuven
KU Leuven has a full-time academic vacancy for a junior tenure-track professor in the Group Science, Engineering and Technology at the Faculty of Engineering Science and the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), in the field of 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.
Teaching
- 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.
Profile
- You have a PhD in engineering science (electrical or similar) where the subject of your doctoral thesis relates to the research field.
- You have a strong profile with extensive research experience at postgraduate level in the field of this vacancy. The quality of your research is apparent from publications in leading international journals and conferences, from proven interdisciplinary and international collaborations and from acquired national and international funding.
- You have demonstrable qualities related to academic education. Teaching experience is an advantage.
- You possess organizational skills and have a cooperative attitude. You also possess leadership capacities within a university context.
- A good command of English is required. KU Leuven provides courses in academic English.
- The official administrative language used at KU Leuven is Dutch. If you do not speak Dutch (or do not speak it well) at the start of your employment, KU Leuven will provide language training to enable you to take part in meetings. Before teaching courses in Dutch, you will be given the opportunity to learn Dutch to the required level.
Offer
- We are offering full-time employment in an intellectually challenging environment.
- KU Leuven is a research-intensive, internationally oriented university that carries out both fundamental and applied scientific research. Our university is highly inter- and multidisciplinary focused and strives for international excellence. In this regard we actively work together with research partners in Belgium and abroad and provide our students with an academic education that is based on high-quality scientific research.
- You will work in Leuven, a historic, dynamic and lively city located in the heart of Belgium, within 20 minutes from Brussels, the capital of the European Union, and less than two hours from Paris, London and Amsterdam.
- KU Leuven is well set to welcome foreign professors and their family and provides practical support with regard to immigration & administration, housing, childcare, learning Dutch, partner career coaching, …
- To facilitate scientific onboarding and accelerate research in the first phase a starting grant of 110.000 euro is offered to new professors without substantial other funding, appointed for at least 50%.
- You will be appointed as tenure-track assistant professor. Tenure and promotion to associate professor can be obtained after 5 years, after positive evaluation and after having acquired the B2 language attestation in Dutch.
Interested?
For more information on the contents of the function, please contact:
• Prof. dr. ir. Frederik Maes, head of the research division ESAT-PSI, tel. +32-16-349025, e-mail: frederik.maes@kuleuven.be
• Prof. dr. ir. Georges Gielen, chair of the department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), tel. +32-16-324076, e-mail: georges.gielen@kuleuven.be