Job openings

[Juergen Schmidhuber]

   1 POSTDOC POSITION                     1 PHD STUDENT POSITION 

                     RECURRENT NEURAL NETS

The Swiss machine learning research institute IDSIA offers 2-year
positions for one postdoc and one PhD student.  Both will be funded by
a research grant on recurrent neural networks.  Intended application
areas include speech recognition and music composition. The grant's
initial focus will be on "Long Short-Term Memory" (LSTM) - see
reference below. Ideal candidates should fully understand the LSTM
paper, have strong mathematical and programming skills, outstanding
research potential, experience with neural nets, excellent ability to
communicate research results, and be willing to build on previous work.
BEGIN: around October 1997.

SWITZERLAND tends to be nice to scientists. It boasts the highest super-
computing capacity pc (per capita), the most Nobel prizes pc (4-5 times
the US value), the highest GNP pc, and the best chocolate.

IDSIA's research focuses on artificial neural nets, reinforcement
learning in partially observable environments, MDL, complexity and
generalization issues, unsupervised learning and information theory,
forecasting, combinatorial optimization, evolutionary computation, and
metalearning. IDSIA is small but visible, competitive, and influential.
It employs about a dozen active researchers and supervises students at
several European universities. Its 1997 scientific output so far includes
9 journal publications (published or in press).

LOCATION: beautiful Lugano, the capital of Ticino, the scenic
southernmost province of Switzerland (pictures in my home page). Milano,
Italy's center of fashion and finance, is 1 hour away, Venice 3 hours.
CSCS, the Ticino supercomputing center, is nearby - we have a direct
connection.

SALARY: commensurate with experience. Postdoc: SFR 60-70K/year (US$
41-48K).  PhD student: SFR 25-30K. Subtract ~20% for taxes & social
security. There is travel funding in case of papers accepted at important
conferences.

INSTRUCTIONS: please send HARDCOPIES (no email!) of CV, list of
publications, cover letter, and your 3 best papers (if applicable) to
Juergen Schmidhuber, IDSIA, Corso Elvezia 36, 6900-Lugano, Switzerland.
Also send a brief email message listing email addresses of three
references to juergen at idsia.ch.  Please use your full name as subject
header.  EXAMPLE: subject: John_Smith

DEADLINE: MAY 31 1997. Earlier applications preferred.

RECURRENT NET REFS (more in http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/onlinepub.html)
-S.Hochreiter & JS: Long Short-Term Memory. Neural Comp. (accepted 1997)
 See ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/lstm.ps.gz
-JS:  A fixed size storage O(n^3) time complexity learning algorithm for 
 fully recurrent continually running nets. Neural Comp.4(2):243-248,1992.
-JS: Learning complex, extended sequences using the principle of history 
 compression.  Neural Comp.4(2):234-242,1992.
-JS: Learning to control fast-weight memories: An alternative to 
 recurrent nets. Neural Comp.4(1):131-139,1992.

                         Juergen Schmidhuber, research director,  IDSIA
                         juergen at idsia.ch  http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen