Postdoc position in machine learning/statistics in Potsdam

Research Field: machine learning and statistics
Duration: 18 months
Starting date: as soon as possible
Closing date for applications: 15. April
Payscale: 36.000 EUR per annum and over depending on past experience
(german TVL E13 salary scale)

Applications should be sent to G. Blanchard (department of mathematics,
Potsdam University), preferably in electronic form at the address

gilles.blanchard(at)gmail.com

(please use the tag “[MASH application]” in the subject line)

=== Project description

The MASH project is a research initiative funded by the Seventh
Framework program of the European Union. It brings together five
european institutions in Switzerland, France, Germany and the Czech
republic.

The goal of the MASH project is to investigate and develop new
algorithms and software to enable large groups of individuals to
collaboratively design and combine large families of feature extractors
for several machine learning scenarios (object recognition in images;
goal planning in a simulated environment and with a real-world robotic
arm). The project has started in 2010 and now has an operating
collaborative web platform open to the public (
http://www.mash-project.eu ). External contributors participate to the
project by uploading the source codes of “feature extractors” into the
platform, which are immediately compiled and integrated in the next
starting experiment. The system encourages contributors to improve upon
the work on other and focus on the main weakness of the overall system.

Of crucial interest is the efficient selection and aggregation of
contributed features under a global computational constraint. The
research at the university of Potsdam will concentrate on theoretical
and practical developments of prediction methods from a very large set
of heterogeneous features. In particular selection, aggregation,
grouping and dimension reduction or randomization techniques will be
considered.
Looked after is a relevant expertise in high-dimensional statistics and
machine learning.

The research will be carried out at the University of Potsdam, Germany,
department of mathematics, under the supervision of Prof. G. Blanchard.
The University of Potsdam is situated about 30km southwest of Berlin,
Germany, and has excellent public transportation connection to the capital.

=== Requirements

University degree (PhD or equivalent) in mathematics, computer science
or engineering. We expect from potential candidates very good
programming skills (C++) and strong background in mathematical
statistics, machine learning and/or learning theory.

The Potsdam University is an equal opportunity employer. The goal is to
enhance the percentage of women in the areas where they are
underrepresented. Women, therefore, are particularly encouraged to apply.