Connectionists: postdoctoral position in Southampton

[Manfred Opper]

The ISIS group at the School of Electronics and Computer
Science of Southampton University invites applications
for a 3 year postdoctoral position for the project

"Inference in Complex Stochastic Dynamic Environmental Models"

funded by EPSRC and NERC. The project is a collaboration
between ISIS, groups at Aston and Surrey universities
and the Met Office as a project partners.

The goal of this exciting multi-institution project is to develop a 
theoretical framework for
probabilistic forecasting in environmental models relevant to
meteorology, climatology and oceanography.
Such models are described by very large systems of nonlinear stochastic
differential equations with often unknown parameters. We will develop 
methods for an approximate inference of probability distributions
and parameters for these models using variational techniques
developed in statistical physics and machine learning. In particular we 
will extend recently developed methods for inference in Gaussian 
processes to the dynamical case, where we will combine the models and 
observations (much as in data assimilation) to infer both the model 
state through time and the unknown model parameters.

Hence, the ideal candidate for this position
has a background in statistical physics or mathematics with a strong 
interest in applying probability theory to complex systems.

Salary will be in the range of 22,774 - 28,009 British Pounds per annum.
The deadline for applications is August 23, 2005.

The Image, Speech and Intelligent Systems (ISIS) group activities are
centred in fundamental theory and algorithm development associated
with adaptive data modelling, machine learning, control theory and
signal processing. The
group is part of the School of Electronics and Computer Science that
received top ratings in both Electronics and Computer Science at the
last RAE.  {\tt \bf http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/info/groups/isis/}.

Informal enquires can be made to Manfred Opper (mo at ecs.soton.ac.uk)
or John Shawe--Taylor (jst at ecs.soton.ac.uk).

Further details about how to apply can be found under
http://www.jobs.soton.ac.uk/adminweb/jsp/jobs/sJobview.jsp?function=View&id=04R0842