Postdoctoral position in Machine Learning Models for Natural Language Understanding Inspired by the Working of the Brain

Potential topics of interest are the acquisition of human language in a visual context, continual learning, learning by analogy, the role of imagination and anticipation in language understanding, and the role of memory in commonsense reasoning and in discourse understanding. The research is financed by the ERC Advanced Grant CALCULUS (Commonsense and Anticipation enriched Learning of Continuous representations sUpporting Language UnderStanding - Horizon 2020 - 788506 - https://calculus-project.eu).

 

The postdoctoral fellow will perform his or her research at the Language Intelligence and Information Retrieval lab (https://liir.cs.kuleuven.be), which is a member of the KU Leuven ELLIS Unit. The European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) promotes basic research in machine learning and modern AI, and involves the very best European academics (https://ellis.eu). KU Leuven ranks among the top 50 universities in THE World University Rankings 2021.

 

Responsibilities

• Perform fundamental research in machine learning and natural language understanding resulting in publications in highly-ranked venues.
• Carry out some teaching duties, which may include lectures, the organization of student seminars, and the supervision of bachelor and master theses.

 

Profile

• You have (or are near completion of) a PhD in Computer Science (or a related field).  
• You have a demonstrated expertise in machine learning and natural language processing.
• You have an outstanding track record of publications in relevant international peer-reviewed A-ranked conferences and in journals with high impact factor in the fields of machine learning and natural language processing.
• You have an excellent knowledge of the English language, both spoken and written.
• You like to work in a team of researchers.
• You are highly motivated, ambitious and result-oriented.

 

We offer

• A postdoctoral position for 2 years (can be prolonged).
• A competitive wage and yearly budget to travel and attend conferences.
• The opportunity for personal development beyond research including the supervision of master and PhD students and the possibility to contribute to teaching.
• A team of colleagues of around 20 high-performing PhD and postdoctoral researchers that regularly publish at top AI venues.
• A team of colleagues that regularly holds (online) team events such as food tasting, sport events and board game nights.
• A monthly journal club to discuss novel research or present your own research. Additionally, we also organise a bi-weekly reading club to read specific papers in depth.
• Access to our deep learning cluster which contains the latest GPU hardware such as multiple RTX 3090 graphics cards.

 

About Leuven and Belgium

• Leuven is a bustling city with many international students and expats and has been voted to be the most innovative city of Europe in 2020.
• Leuven is a 20-minute commute to Brussels, the capital of Europe.
• Belgium contains a vast cultural heritage such as the historic center of Bruges, the Antwerp train station (voted to be one of the most beautiful train stations in the world), and many more.
• Belgium is known for its exquisite cuisine, beer, pastry, candy, …
• Belgium is located at the center of Europe! You can easily visit Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, London, … from Belgium by train or car.

 

Interested

If interested, please apply before March 10 at: https://www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jobsite/jobs/60001917
The position will be filled as soon as a suitable candidate is found.