Jobs for PhD Students & PostDocs 2016: RNNAIssance (original) (raw)

JOBS FOR PHD STUDENTS & POSTDOCS 2016
Update of Oct 7: Most positions are filled, but one postdoc position is still open - closes Oct 31!

Are you interested in continual reinforcement learning (RL) in realistic environmentswhere traditional RL (for board games etc) does not work well, where we need some sort of search for programsrunning on general purpose computers such as recurrent neural networks(RNNs), and where a good RL machine should learn to plan and reason in hierarchicaland other abstract ways?

Join the Deep Learning team (since 1991) that won more competitions than any other.We are seeking PhD students and postdocs for Jürgen Schmidhuber's research group at theSwiss AI Lab IDSIA, for the RNNAIssance Project based on arXiv:1511.09249 on "learning to think." It is about general purpose artificial intelligencefor agents living in partially observable environments, controlled by reinforcement learning RNNs, supported by unsupervised predictive RNN world models. Our first papers on such RL control systems based on two interacting RNNs date back to 1990 and 1991, but now, a quarter century later, finally we know how to do it right. (You will also collaborate with other lab members on other projects - we are one big family!)

Duration: initially for 2 years, with possibility of prolongation.

We are looking for outstanding candidates with experience / interest in topics such asdeep learning neural networks,RNNs and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM),evolutionary computation,RNN evolution,compressed network search,reinforcement learning & policy gradients for partially observable environments,unsupervised learning,curiosity-driven learning and the Formal Theory of Fun & Creativity, adaptive robotics,hierarchical reinforcement learning, generalartificial intelligence,universal learning machines. The general goal is to advance the state of the art in machine learning and AI. Preferred start: As soon as possible.

INSTRUCTIONS: Submit your CV, a brief statement of why you'd like to work with us on such topics, and a list of 3 references and their email addresses to rnnai2016@idsia.ch. In the subject header, mention your full name followed by the keyword rnnai2016. (Add "PhD" in case of PhD students. For example, if your name is Jo Mo, and you are applying as a PhD student, use subject: Jo Mo rnnai2016 PhD)

As a PhD student, you must also submit your material to SUPSI through THIS ONLINE FORM (now closed). As a postdoc, you must also submit your material to SUPSI through THIS ONLINE FORM (open again until Oct 31).

PhD student salary: Initially CHF 46'000 per year (>US$ 46k as of 21 Oct 2016). Standard postdoc salary: CHF 80'000 per year (>US$ 80k as of 21 Oct). Low Swiss taxes. There is travel funding in case of papers accepted at important conferences. There are also exciting connections to the world of AI startups.

There is an opportunity to participate in teaching courses (in English) on machine learning, e.g., in the master's program at the University of Lugano.

Requirements are also published within the "Direttive interne SUPSI" (direttiva 7A, Art. 2) and within "Regolamento del personale SUPSI" on the website www.supsi.ch (follow SUPSI, Documenti ufficiali). Official language at IDSIA is English.

The Swiss AI Lab 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. It is small but visible, competitive, and influential. For example, itwon many international pattern recognition competitions.Its highly citedAnt 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 optimalUniversal Artificial Intelligence and self-referentialUniversal Problem Solvers (previous work on general AI was dominated by heuristics). IDSIA's artificial Recurrent Neural Networkslearn to solve numerous previous unlearnable sequence processing tasks through gradient descent,Artificial Evolution and other methods. In particular, IDSIA's LSTM RNNs are now available to billions of smartphone users, e.g., for speech recognition. 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. Numerous TV shows on Tech & Science helped to popularize IDSIA's achievements. IDSIA is affiliated with the University of Lugano (USI) and USI's Faculty of Informatics and SUPSI. Many IDSIA alumni went on to become professors. Google DeepMind is heavily influenced by our former students: DeepMind's first PhDs in AI and Machine Learning came from our lab, one of them co-founder, one of them first employee; others joined later. IDSIA is located just outside the beautiful city of Lugano in Ticino (pics), the scenic southern Swiss province. Milano, Italy's center of fashion and finance, is 1 hour away, Venice 3 hours.

Switzerland is the world's leading science nation.It is the origin of special relativity (1905) and theWorld Wide Web (1990), is associated with 105 Nobel laureates, and boasts far more Nobel prizes per capita than any other nation with over 1m population. 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. As of 2016, Switzerland is the world's most competitive country for the 7th year in a row, according to the World Economic Forum. It's also the happiest country (1990s average), according to the Happiness Foundation.More.
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