Juergen Schmidhuber's Robot Learning Group at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA is expanding.
He is seeking 5 outstanding postdocs and 5 excellent PhD students with experience / interest
in topics such as adaptive robotics http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/learningrobots.html ,
curiosity-driven learning & intrinsic motivations based on the theory of surprise
and interestingness http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html , computer vision,
reinforcement learning & policy gradients for partially observable environments
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/rl.html ,
artificial evolution http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/evolution.html ,
recurrent neural networks (RNN) http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/rnn.html ,
RNN evolution http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/rnnevolution.html ,
hierarchical reinforcement learning http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/subgoals.html ,
statistical / Bayesian approaches to machine learning,
statistical robotics http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/statisticalrobotics.html ,
unsupervised learning http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ica.html ,
general artificial intelligence http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ai.html ,
universal learning machines http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html
& http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html .
Goal: to improve the state of the art in adaptive robotics and machine learning in general,
in both theory and practice. Funding is provided by several new EU projects, one on developmental
robotics with adaptive iCub humanoids exploring the world like little infants, one on learning to
control artificial hands with antagonistic & stiff muscles, and one on self-reference and "humanobs."
But all postdocs and students will interact with each other and resident IDSIAni - we are one big family!
Our international project partners include leading neuroscientists, machine learners, psychologists, roboticists,
and other experts from Germany, the UK, Italy, Scandinavia, the US, and other countries.
Salary: commensurate with experience. Postdocs ~ SFR 72,000 / year (~ US$ 67,000 / EUR 48,000 / GBP 46,000 as of 1/1/09).
PhD fellowships: ~ SFR 38,000 / year (~ $ 35,000 as of 1/1/09). Low taxes.
There is travel funding in case of papers accepted at important conferences.
Interviews: most will take place at IDSIA in Switzerland, but we will also arrange meetings in the period 5-17 March 2009
in the area Washington / New York / Boston, where JS will give the AGI-09 keynote and talks at various US East Coast labs.
Instructions: Submit your CV, a brief statement of research interests, and a list of 3 references and their email
addresses to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]
Do NOT send preprints or other large files; instead send URLs.
In the subject header, mention your full name, the keyword eu2009, and either phd or postdoc.
For example, if your name is Jo Mo, and you are applying for a PhD fellowship, use subject: Jo Mo phd eu2009
Job URL: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/eu2009.html
Some of the jobs will be related to the theory of surprise & attention & intrinsic rewards
& active exploration & curiosity (1990-2008): http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html .
Schmidhuber's recent overview:
Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential
Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness,
Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes (2008, based
on keynote talk for KES 2008 and joint invited lecture for ALT 2007 / DS
2007; variants to appear in SICE Journal & Proc. ABIALS). arXiv
preprint: http://arXiv.org/abs/0812.4360
Abstract. I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself
to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer
once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus
making it subjectively simpler and more `beautiful.' Curiosity is the
desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data
that is novel and surprising not in the traditional sense of Boltzmann
and Shannon but in the sense that it allows for compression progress
because its regularity was not yet known. This drive maximizes
interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or
compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve. It
motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists,
dancers, comedians, yourself, and recent artificial systems.
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The non-profit research 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. Its highly cited Ant
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 optimal Universal Artificial
Intelligence and self-referential Universal Problem Solvers (previous work
on general AI was dominated by heuristics). IDSIA's artificial Recurrent
Neural Networks learn to solve numerous previous unlearnable sequence
processing tasks through gradient descent, artificial evolution and other
methods. 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, the NY Times, der SPIEGEL, etc.
Many TV shows on Tech & Science helped to popularize IDSIA's
achievements.
Switzerland is a good place for scientists. It is the origin of special
relativity (1905) and the World Wide Web (1990), is associated with 105
Nobel laureates, and boasts far more Nobel prizes per capita than any
other nation. 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. Switzerland
also got the highest ranking in the list of happiest countries.
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