Connectionists: [jobs] 2 Available Postdoc Positions in Neural Control and Embedded System Technologies for for Brain Machine Interface at University of Southern Denmark in Odense

Wed Oct 5 05:33:28 EDT 2016

Two postdoc positions available for our new FET-PROACT project on monkey brain-based smart house control

The Embodied AI and Neurorobotics Lab http://ens-lab.sdu.dk/ , part of Centre for BioRobotics (CBR) at the Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute at the University of Southern Denmark, is offering:

Two postdoc positions starting from January 2017 or as soon as possible thereafter, for up to four years.

The postdocs will work on our exciting Plan4Act: "Predictive Neural Information for Proactive Actions: From Monkey Brain to Smart House Control" project recently funded by FET-Proactive (Area 2: Biotech for better life) under Horizon 2020 Framework Program.

The goal of the Plan4Act project is to record and understand predictive neural activity from monkey brain and use it to proactively control devices in a smart house. The far-future vision behind this is to endow motor-impaired patients with the ability to plan a daily-life goal - like making coffee - and achieve it without having to invoke one by one every single individual action to reach this goal.

In the context of the project, we provide two topics for the positions:

Topic 1 "neural control technology": Postdoc1 will focus on the development of generic adaptive neural-based control for processing recorded sequence-predicting neural activity from monkey brain, predicting the upcoming sequence of actions, and finally generating the corresponding complex action sequences for smart house control.

Topic 2 "embedded system technology": Postdoc2 will focus on the development of a controller board based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for the hardware implementation of the adaptive neural-based control. The FPGA-based hardware controller will interface with a neural recording device and a smart house. It will receive neural activities from monkey brain through the recording device, process the information, and transmit final commands to a smart house.

The successful candidates will be expected to have

1) a PhD degree in

- Topic1: theoretical and computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, physics of complex systems, control system engineering, robotics or a quantitative field.

- Topic2: embedded system, electrical engineering and computer science, robotics or a quantitative field.

2) articles published in international peer-reviewed journals documenting experience with

 - Topic1: neural dynamics, learning and adaptation in neural systems, mean field methods, complex signal processing, information theory, adaptive control for human-machine interaction.

 - Topic2: brain machine interface, embedded systems, FPGA systems (Design), FPGA interfacing, Neural Networks in FPGAs, etc.

3) strong background on

 - Topic1: artificial neural networks (in particular recurrent networks and cell assemblies), statistical machine learning, mean field theory, information theory, complex signal processing, hardware implementation, robotics, and adaptive control for human-machine interaction.

- Topic2: system integration, FPGA system design, PCB design, Circuit Design, Xilinx FPGAs, Micro Blaze, Zynq, Neural Networks in FPGAs.

4) good programming skills (e.g., ROS, C, C++, MatLab for Topic1, and VHDL, C, C++, Matlab Simulink for Topic2).

Additionally, the candidate should have excellent writing skills and be able to work independently. The successful candidates for the positions will be affiliated to the Embodied AI and Neurorobotics Lab at the Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute, the University of Southern Denmark.

Applicants should provide a covering letter explaining their approach to the problems of Topic1 and Topic2 alluded to above, and at most three articles illustrating their publication record and research interests, in addition to standard items such as CV, full publication list, etc.

Please refer to the official advert [1] for application details and guideline. The deadline for applications via the online system [1] is 15 November 2016.

[1] https://ssl1.peoplexs.com/Peoplexs22/CandidatesPortalNoLogin/Vacancy.cfm?PortalID=3794&VacatureID=859268

Contact Information:

Further information is available from

Associate Prof. Poramate Manoonpong, email poma at mmmi.sdu.dk<mailto:poma at mmmi.sdu.dk>

Assistant Prof. Jørgen Christian Larsen, email jcla at mmmi.sdu.dk<mailto:jcla at mmmi.sdu.dk>

Research environment: Please see http://ens-lab.sdu.dk/contact   for the location of the Embodied AI and Neurorobotics Lab.

To get a better idea of related research, please visit http://ens-lab.sdu.dk

Best regards

Poramate Manoonpong

Associate Professor

The Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute

T

+45 65 50 86 98 <tel:+4565508698>

poma at mmmi.sdu.dk <mailto:poma at mmmi.sdu.dk>

University of Southern Denmark

Campusvej 55

DK-5230 Odense M

www.sdu.dk <http://www.sdu.dk>

[http://cdn.sdu.dk/img/sdulogos/SDU_BLACK_signatur.png]

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