[alife] postdoc position on language evolution and computation

paul vogt paulv at ling.ed.ac.uk
Wed Apr 7 13:35:34 PDT 2004


This text is also available at 
http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/employees/cml/vacancies/8100406.html.


Tilburg University is a specialized institute of learning and research, 
with emphasis on social sciences and the humanities. It employs more 
than 1600 people and has a student body of around 10,000. There are 19 
colleges and 10 research institutes, which provide (postgraduate) 
tuition and research of outstanding quality.

*Faculty of Arts*
In its education and research programme, the Faculty of Arts addresses 
socially relevant domains in the field of language, communication, 
information and literary culture. Important areas of interest are 
business communication and digital media, discourse studies, 
multilingualism in a multicultural society, culture and literature, 
linguistics and artificial intelligence.

The section Computational Linguistics at Tilburg University (The 
Netherlands) has, subject to the availability of financial resources, a 
position available for a:

*RESEARCHER ON LANGUAGE EVOLUTION AND COMPUTATION (POSTDOC)*
(m/f, 38 hours a week, vacancy number 810.04.06)

*Project information*
The section Computational Linguistics at Tilburg University might 
receive funding for 3 years for a postdoctoral researcher, starting 1 
June 2004. The funding is part of a project entitled 'New and Emergent 
World Models Through Individual, Evolutionary, and Social Learning' (NEW 
TIES). This project is funded by the European Commission and is a joint 
project with researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The 
Netherlands), Napier University (Edinburgh, UK), University of Surrey 
(UK), Eotvos Lorand University (Budapest, Hungary) and Tilburg 
University. See http://www.cs.vu.nl/~gusz/newties/newties.html 
<http://www.cs.vu.nl/%7Egusz/newties/newties.html> for the project 
home-page.

NEW TIES is a highly ambitious project that aims at simulating the 
evolution of cultures in large populations of multi-agent systems 
through indivudual and social learning of, e.g., behavioural skills and 
language. The experiments will be set in a large computer network based 
on peer-to-peer technology and another part of the project will focus on 
monitoring how the culture (including language) evolves.
Central to this project is the part that studies evolution of 
communication, language and cooperation in a large scale multi-agent 
society. The researcher in Tilburg will be responsible for implementing 
this central part.

*Main tasks*
The researcher's task will focus on the design of computational 
experiments concerning the origins and evolution of communication, 
language and cooperation. These experiments will have to be carried out 
both as a stand alone experiment and integrated with the contribution of 
the other partners in the project. Important areas within the research 
are scalability, the symbol grounding problem, the emergence of 
communication as such and the origins of grammatical structures as 
described in workpackage 3 of the project proposal 
(http://www.cs.vu.nl/~gusz/newties/newties.html 
<http://www.cs.vu.nl/%7Egusz/newties/newties.html>). Part of the 
research will be carried out in Edinburgh. In addition, the researcher 
will be responsible for the local organisation of the computer network 
(not necessarily the computer support).

*Profile*
The ideal candidate is an enthousiastic instigator and has a strong 
background in language evolution and computation, modelling multi-agent 
systems (preferably language models), evolutionary computation, machine 
learning, linguistics and/or psycholinguistics. Java programming skills 
are a further advantage. The candidate should have finished (or is about 
to finish) his/her Ph.D. in the field of artificial intelligence, 
artificial life, computational linguistics or another relevant area with 
the cognitive sciences.

*Terms of employment*
The collective labour agreement of Tilburg University applies. The 
selected candidate will get a three years contract (full-time). Pay 
classification is according to level of experience and expertise, with a 
minimum of 2.179,-- and a maximum of 3.453,-- euro per month (salary 
scale 10). Furthermore, the usual facilities (desk, computer, some 
travel money) are offered, as well as support with housing, 
immigrations, etc.

*Information*
For further information, please contact Dr. Paul Vogt email: 
p.a.vogt at uvt.nl <mailto:p.a.vogt at uvt.nl>, 
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~paulv <http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/%7Epaulv> or 
consult the project's home page 
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~gusz/newties/newties.html 
<http://www.cs.vu.nl/%7Egusz/newties/newties.html>

*Applications*
Interested candidates should send in their application and CV before 26 
April 2004 to: Tilburg University, Faculty of Arts, O.M. Zweekhorst, 
M.A., Managing Director, Room U 40, P.O. Box 90153 5000 LE Tilburg The 
Netherlands. Or by email: solliciterenFDL at uvt.nl 
<mailto:solliciterenFDL at uvt.nl>.

It is the policy of the university to increase the number of women 
employed. Also members of ethnic minority groups and handicapped are 
especially invited to apply.

-- 
Dr. Paul Vogt
Researcher in Language Evolution and Computation
ILK / Computational Linguistics, Tilburg University
P.O.Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~paulv/






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