Connectionists: phd position in computational models of language and vision

[Marco Baroni]

PHD POSITION IN COMPUTATIONAL MODELS OF LANGUAGE AND VISION

One PhD position/studentship to study computational models of language
and vision is available in the Language, Interaction and Computation
track of the 3-year PhD program offered by the Center for Mind/Brain
Sciences at the University of Trento (Italy) (www.unitn.it/en/cimec).

The PhD program (start date: November 2015) is taught in English by an
international faculty. The Language, Interaction & Computation track
is organized by the CIMeC-CLIC laboratory, an interdisciplinary group
of researchers studying language and conceptualization using both
computational and cognitive methods (clic.cimec.unitn.it).

The topic of the PhD thesis will be defined with the student selected
as PhD candidate. Possible research directions include:
Compositionality in images; Methaphors in images; Searching for images
through natural language queries; Language, vision and reasoning. The
selected student will work closely with the research team of
the ERC project COMPOSES (http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/composes/).

* Desired Profile *

Given the interdisciplinary nature of the project, we seek a brilliant
student with at least some of the following background:

- Machine learning
- Computer Vision
- Natural Language Processing
- Good programming skills
- Ability to work with big data
- Mathematical and statistical skills.

If you think that your background is relevant to the research program
outlined on the project website (clic.cimec.unitn.it/lavi) and you
have good programming and quantitative skills, please do get in touch
even if you do not fully fit the profile above.

All prospective students are expected to have an interest in working
in an interdisciplinary environment.


* The Research Environment *

The CLIC lab (clic.cimec.unitn.it) is a unit of the University of
Trento's Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC,
www.unitn.it/en/cimec), an English-speaking, interdisciplinary center
for research on brain and cognition whose staff includes
neuroscientists, psychologists, (computational) linguists, computer
scientists and physicists.

CLIC consists of researchers from the Departments of Computer Science
(DISI) and Psychology and Cognitive Science (DiPSCo) carrying out
research on a range of topics including concept acquisition,
corpus-based computational semantics, combining NLP and computer
vision, combining brain and corpus data to study cognition, formal
semantics and theoretical linguistics.

CLIC is part of the larger network of research labs focusing on
Natural Language Processing and related domains in the Trento region,
that is quickly becoming one of the areas with the highest
concentration of researchers in NLP and related fields anywhere in
Europe.

The CLIC/CIMeC laboratories are located in beautiful Rovereto, a
lively town in the middle of the Alps, famous for its contemporary art
museum, the quality of its wine, and the range of outdoors sport and
relax opportunities it offers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rovereto


* Application Information *

The official call of the Doctoral School in Cognitive and Brain
Sciences will be announced shortly, and application details will be
available on the page:

http://www.unitn.it/en/drcimec/10140/admission-doctoral-school-cognitive-and-brain-sciences

We strongly encourage a preliminary expression of interest in the
project. Please contact Raffaella Bernardi (bernardi at disi.unitn.it),
attaching a CV in pdf or txt format, or a link to an online CV. For
information about the application process, please contact the school
administrator (phd.cimec at unitn.it).

-- 
Marco Baroni
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC)
University of Trento
http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/marco