<div dir="ltr"><div><div class="m_-7527861239420018867gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div><font face="tahoma, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><span style="font-family:Helvetica">Title: Postdoctoral Position in How
Programming Languages Shape Thought @ the </span><a href="https://www.knowledgelab.org/" target="_blank" style="font-family:Helvetica">Knowledge Lab</a><span style="font-family:Helvetica">, </span><a href="https://www.uchicago.edu/" target="_blank" style="font-family:Helvetica">UChicago</a><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">

<p class="MsoNormal" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> <u></u><u></u></span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">The Knowledge Lab at the University
of Chicago seeks to hire outstanding candidates for a
postdoctoral research project with support from the Sloan Foundation to
explore the degree to which programming languages and data science environments
shape how individuals, groups and communities “think”—how they construct
code, analyze data and solve computational problems together. The project,
titled “The Impact of Programming Languages and Datascience Frameworkson
Thinking, Software, and Science" is inspired by the longstanding
Sapir/Whorf Hypothesis that natural languages influence how speakers
think, which has garnered new evidence with computational methods and
large-scale language data. This project involves analysis of all public GitHub
and other code repositories with statistical and machine learning approaches
that generate insights that link programming language properties to individual
and group behavior to coding and analytical outputs. Based on insights from
these large-scale analyses and ongoing surveys of programming communities, we
will generate programming experiments (e.g., with the Jupyter interface)
to test whether discovered associations are causal—whether changing languages
can predictably improve the efficiency, collaboration, and creativity of coders
and coding communities.<u></u><u></u></span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> <u></u><u></u></span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">Postdoctoral candidates will design
and conduct independent research, in collaboration with UChicago Professor
and Santa Fe Institute external faculty James Evans, Director of Knowledge Lab,
and Gary Lupyan, a computational psychologist from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. Candidates much hold a PhD in Computer Science, or
have substantial computational and data science background and a Ph.D. in
Statistics, Applied Math, Sociology or another Social Science, Linguistics,
Informatics, (statistical) Physics or a related field, and a strong publishing
background.<u></u><u></u></span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> <u></u><u></u></span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">Specifically, the successful
candidate(s) will be responsible for managing and analyzing a massive
collection of version controlled source code with Machine Learning (ML)
and Natural language Processing (NLP) techniques. Candidates must
understand and will need to maintain long running web scraping tasks, via
APIs and HTML parsing and have knowledge regarding the state of the art in
NLP (specifically neural language models, context free grammars and auto
encoders), which they will extend to new domains, primarily programming
code. This development of new techniques for understanding source code
will likely benefit from knowledge of compiler design, static analysis, complex
systems and network analysis. Candidates must have knowledge of Python and
experience running large scale computational tasks on UNIX systems. Proficiency
in multiple other programming languages, including a functional language,
would be a benefit. Positions could begin anytime within the coming year,
and as early as immediately.<u></u><u></u></span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="font-family:Helvetica"> <u></u><u></u></span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="font-family:Helvetica">To apply, please send CV, cover
letter and names for letters from at least two references to Candice
Lewis, <span class="m_-7527861239420018867m_5340557500360463912MsoHyperlink"><span style="color:#1155cc"><a href="mailto:cllewis@uchicago.edu" target="_blank">cllewis@uchicago.edu</a></span></span>.<span class="m_-7527861239420018867HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><u></u><u></u></font></span></span></p><span class="m_-7527861239420018867HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">

<p class="MsoNormal" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;color:#4b4b4b"><u></u> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><span style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34)">Candice Lewis, Ph.D.</span></p></font></span></div></div><div style="font-size:small;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-color:initial"><font face="tahoma, sans-serif" size="2">Assistant Director<br><a href="https://www.knowledgelab.org/" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">The Knowledge Lab</a><br>University of Chicago<br>5735 S Ellis Ave| Room 221<br>Chicago, IL 60637</font><br></div><br class="gmail-Apple-interchange-newline"><br></div>