postdoc position on language evolution and computation

Subject: postdoc position on language evolution and computation Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 12:28:49 +0200 From: Paul Vogt &lt;p.a.vogt(a)UVT.NL&gt; Dear colleague, I send this posting to you as you or or someone you know might be interesting in the following vacancy. Please distribute this to anyone who might be interested. Yours sincerely, Paul Vogt 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(a)uvt.nl <mailto:p.a.vogt@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(a)uvt.nl <mailto:solliciterenFDL@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/