Faculty of Science – Informatics Institute
Salary indication €2,325 to €2,972 gross per month
The Faculty of Science holds a leading position internationally in its fields of research and participates in a large number of cooperative programs with universities, research institutes and businesses. The faculty has a student body of around 6,500 and 1,500 members of staff, spread over eight research institutes and a number of faculty-wide support services. A considerable part of the research is made possible by external funding from Dutch and international organizations and the private sector. The Faculty of Science offers thirteen Bachelor's degree programs and eighteen Master’s degree programs in the fields of the exact sciences, computer science and information studies, and life and earth sciences.
The Informatics Institute is one of the large research institutes with the faculty, with a focus on complex information systems divided in two broad themes: 'Computational Systems' and 'Intelligent Systems.' The institute has a prominent international standing and is active in a dynamic scientific area, with a strong innovative character and an extensive portfolio of externally funded projects.
World-class research groups include ILPS (information retrieval led by Prof. Maarten de Rijke), AMLAB (machine learning led by Prof. Max Welling), and ISIS (computer vision led by Prof. Cees Snoek). Further, there is a number of industry funded research labs including the Ahold-UvA Lab, the Bosch-UvA Lab, the Qualcomm-UVA Lab, and the SAP-UvALab.
Project description
The three positions (2 PhD students and 1 Postdoctoral researcher) are funded by the NWO VIDI grant (016.Vidi.189.039), received by Prof. Evangelos Kanoulas, to conduct research on Conversational Search Engines. The successful applicants will be members of the Human-Machine Intelligent Lab (HuMIL), led by Prof. Kanoulas, which is part of the Information Language Processing Systems (ILPS) group, led by Prof. De Rijke. Research at ILPS is focused on technology that connects people to information: search engines, recommender systems, and conversational agents. We are organized in four labs (AI for Retail Lab, Human-Machine Intelligence Lab, Information Retrieval Lab, and Language Technology Lab). ILPS is composed by 6 professors and around 30 PhD candidates.
Searching for information in digital repositories plays a central role in today’s life. With the amount of available data growing rapidly, we rely on intelligent agents, search engines, to retrieve relevant information. The research on Conversational Search Engines aims to design algorithms that learn models of relevance with the help of human interaction, by coupling human input and machines during the learning process, as well as to design methods and build datasets that can be used to evaluate the quality of the proposed models and algorithms, and demonstrate their societal value to fields such as law, and medicine.
Requirements
- Master degree in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Physics or related field;
- excellent programming skills (e.g. R, Python, C/C++);
- solid mathematics foundations, especially statistics, calculus and linear algebra;
- highly motivated;
- fluent in English, both written and spoken.
- Proven experience with machine learning / natural lnguage processing / information retrieval is a big plus.
For more information click "LINK TO ORIGINAL" below.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
https://www.uva.nl/en/content/vacancies/2019/03/19-145-2-phd-positions-in-conversational-search-engines.html?origin=dxuSI3bDRY2CW7N9J3yPlw