Connectionists: Postdoc opportunity at MIT

[Nancy Lynch]

Dear connectionist list members,

Here is a general postdoc ad that you might be interested in:

The Theory of Distributed Systems group at MIT will have openings for  
one or possibly two postdocs starting around Summer, 2017. Our main  
areas of interest now are:

    Biological distributed algorithms (insect colonies, brain networks, ...)
    Wireless network algorithms
    Distributed graph network algorithms, but in particular those that  
can tolerate noise, failures, change, etc.

Please send a quick note to Nancy Lynch, lynch at csail.mit.edu if you  
are interested, and follow up soon with your CV, publication list, a  
short statement describing your research interests, and a list of 3 or  
so research references.

.......

For people reading this list in particular, I expect that you would be  
most interested in our brain networks research direction (of course).   
To get an idea of the type of work we are doing in this area, see our  
new ITCS paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02084

We use a sort of probabilistic Spiking Neural Network model, define  
problems formally, and give specific circuits and general lower bounds  
for solving the problems in terms of the model.  We analyze costs in  
terms of time bounds and network size.  The analysis is heavily  
probabilistic.  We are interested in understanding how to compose  
solutions to simple brain problems to build solutions to more  
complicated problems.  We are interested in analyzing tolerance to  
noise and uncertainty.

I hope this gives you an idea of what the project is like.

Nancy Lynch