Connectionists: Postdoc opening at UMass

[Andrew McCallum]

----------------------------------------------------------------------
		       Postdoctoral Fellowship
				  in

	    Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing,
     Information Extraction, Information Integration & Data Mining

We are seeking one or two highly creative and motivated Postdoctoral
Research Fellows to join the Information Extraction and Synthesis
Laboratory (McCallum's Lab) in the Department of Computer Science,
University of Massachusetts Amherst.

We are especially interested in people with expertise in statistical
machine learning, graphical models including Markov random fields,
Bayesian methods, MCMC, and other forms of approximate inference.
Previous experience applying these techniques to problems in text data
is not necessary.  This is an opportunity to exercise your
machine-learning know-how on real data and real problems.

Project opportunities include:

* information extraction, integration and analysis of massive
   bibliographic databases of research papers, authors, institutions
   and venues;
* social network analysis of various sociological, political and
   bibliographic data using Bayesian latent variable models (topic
   models)---in collaboration with various social science faculty;
* probabilistic modeling of natural language dialog, designing methods
   that will do joint, unified inference all the way from natural
   language understanding, through dialog pragmatics, to perception and
   action in a shared world;
* machine learning for natural language understanding with minimal
   supervision, learning alignments, and semi-supervised learning.

UMass offers an attractive environment for research at the
intersection of machine learning and textual information---with
significant strength in information retrieval, machine learning, their
intersection, and other related areas.  We also have strong ties to
our statistics department, and other nearby universities.  We have
large staff and computing infrastructure to support significant
projects.

Ranked among the top AI groups in the U.S., UMass has an exciting and
highly collaborative CS department.  UMass is located in bucolic
western New England, surrounded by five other colleges, and also
within day-trip range of both Boston and New York.


Prospective candidates should email both Andrew McCallum
<mccallum at cs.umass.edu>, and Jean Joyce <jean at cs.umass.edu> about your
interest.  If you are attending the ICML 2008 conference please feel
free to contact Andrew about these positions at the conference.

The University of Massachusetts is an Affirmative Action/Equal
Opportunity employer.