[alife] Research Assisant in Developmental Robotics

[Kerstin Dautenhahn]

Research Assistant in Developmental Robotics

The University of Hertfordshire
School of Computer Science
Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences

Adaptive Systems Research Group

Salary (£ 15,242 per annum, pay award pending)                    Ref: L6118AC

Applications from postgraduate candidates are invited for a full-time 
research assistantship in developmental robotics. The post offers the 
opportunity to work within the Adaptive Systems Research Group, a proactive 
and dynamic research team with an excellent international research profile. 
The successful candidate will work in the European project Robot-Cub 
(ROBotic Open-architecture Technology for Cognition, Understanding and 
Behaviour). Our goal in Robot-Cub is two-fold: (1) to create an open 
physical platform for embodied research that can be taken up and used by 
the research community to further their particular approach to the 
development of cognitive systems, and (2) to advance our understanding of 
several key issues in cognition by exploiting this platform in the 
investigation of several cognitive capabilities. The embodied cognitive 
system (Robot-cub) will be shaped, physically and mentally, like a human 
child and will be designed as an “open system” to be shared by scientists 
as a common tool for addressing cognition and human-machine interface. More 
specifically, the issue of learning and remembering interaction histories, 
i.e. meaningful experiences in interactions with the inanimate and animate 
environment will be a main theme in the work carried out by the research 
team at University of Hertfordshire.  Other topics that will be addressed 
are grounding of communication in imitative interaction games. The work 
includes working mainly with existing mobile robotics platforms available 
in the Adaptive Systems Research Group.

Applicants are expected to have excellent qualifications and experience in 
biologically inspired research, Artificial Life or related disciplines. A 
specialist postgraduate degree or other strong evidence of research 
experience is required, as well as excellent skills in presenting research 
and writing scientific documents. The successful candidate should also be 
interested in working in an interdisciplinary and European research 
team.  The work will form the basis of the candidate’s PhD research.

The position is based on a fixed-term contract of up to three years. The 
post is available full-time. Start date: September 2004 or later, pending 
final contract.

Informal enquiries can be made to the research coordinator Prof. K. 
Dautenhahn (K.Dautenhahn at herts.ac.uk).

Closing Date                 21 July 2004

Interview Date              11 August 2004
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Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn
Professor of Artificial Intelligence
Adaptive Systems Research Group
http://adapsys.feis.herts.ac.uk/
The University of Hertfordshire, School of Computer Science
College Lane, Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB, United Kingdom
URL: http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~comqkd
E-mail: K.Dautenhahn at herts.ac.uk
Fax: +44-1707-284-303 Tel: +44-1707-284-333