Connectionists: summer internship at Siemens Corporate Technology (Princeton, NJ)

[Francisco Pereira]

Our team in the Imaging and Computer Vision department at Siemens
Corporate Technology, in Princeton NJ, has a summer intern position,
working in a project investigating the representation of semantic
information in the brain, and how it is used during sentence
comprehension. Our goal is to build a computational model of the
process of language comprehension at the sentence level, using text
corpora and other linguistic resources, and validate it with
behavioral and brain imaging data.

The main role of the intern will be to help in developing and
implementing methods to extract information from text corpora, as well
as models for emulating human performance on a variety of benchmark
psychological tests. Examples of tasks you might be asked to do:

- prepare and process text corpora (parse, convert to other formats, etc)
- generate distributed semantic representations for words and sentences
- extract structured information from text corpora
- combine information from text corpora and resources such as WordNet
and FrameNet
- implement evaluation tasks to benchmark the models developed

It is an unusual position in that you would be doing machine learning
tasks to further cognitive neuroscience goals, gaining experience in
both areas. In addition to the core research goals, we will also be
delivering a concrete system to the funding agency; hence, this is a
fast-paced project with multiple opportunities for publication. This
work is being carried out in collaboration with researchers at MIT and
Princeton University and funded by the IARPA Knowledge Representation
in Neural Systems program (
http://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/krns ).

Requirements:
- current student in a graduate program in Computer Science/Electrical
Engineering/Machine Learning
- experience developing software in MATLAB, Python or Perl
- experience carrying out NLP tasks and using frameworks such as
CoreNLP or NLTK.

If interested, please send your resume to francisco-pereira at siemens.com.