[alife] PHD POSITION: COMPUTATIONAL NEURAL MECHANISMS OF THE NEURAL ENCODING OF ACTION SAMANTICS (Hertie Institute / Center for Integrative Neuroscience, Tuebingen, Germany)

[Compsens]

PHD POSITION: COMPUTATIONAL NEURAL MECHANISMS
OF THE NEURAL ENCODING OF ACTION SAMANTICS (Hertie Institute /
Center for Integrative Neuroscience, Tuebingen, Germany)
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Action perception and action execution are tightly linked in the
brain, and how these funcions are neurally encoded has
received a lot of interest in recent research in neuroscience.
The clarification of the underlying neural mechanisms
requires the tight interaction between theoretical and
experimental neuroscience.

Collaborating closely with physiologists from the
Department of Cognitive Neurology and M.I.T., we
investigate experimentally the neural encoding of actions during
perception and execution. We develop physiologically-inspired
neural and probabilistic models for the visual processing of actions
and its interaction with motor representations. Applying advanced
statistical Bayesian approaches, we investigate the semantic
structure of action representations based on neural data, and we
exploit advanced technologies for online animation in order to
investigate the dynamics of neural representations of
actions in premotor cortex.

We look for a theoretically oriented researcher with strong
interest in physiology and systems neuroscience.
Ideal candidates for this position should have:

* a Masters degree in Computer Science,
   Electrical Engineering, Physics, or Biology with
   good mathematical and reasonable programming skills
* Basic knowledge about neural networks or machine
   learning, or models of biological functions
* programming experience (Matlab, C++, or Python)
* a strong interest in theoretical and experimental
   neuroscience, and especially in higher-level
   vision, motor control, or cognition
* English speaking and writing skills.

Applications with inappropriate background (e.g. in
molecular or cell biology) will not be considered.

Committed to Equal Opportunities.

The Section of Computational Sensomotorics is working
on computational and neural models of action processing,
and technical applications related to action perception and
control. Our lab is part of the Dept. of Cognitive Neurology
at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research (HIH), a
leading European institution in Clinical Neuroscience.
It is also part of the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative
Neuroscience (CIN), an Excellence cluster from the German
Research organization with more than 70 groups working
on different aspects of systems neuroscience, and of the
Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Tübingen.

Please send applications preferentially electronically
(including CV, marks and 2 letters of reference)
as soon as possible to
Prof. Dr. Martin Giese, Hertie Institute
for Clinical Brain Research  & Centre for
Integrative Neuroscience, Otfried-Mueller-Str. 25,
72076 Tuebingen, Germany;
email: martin.giese at uni-tuebingen.de