Saarland University is seeking to establish several
Junior Research Groups (W1/W2)
within the recently established Cluster of Excellence “Multimodal Computing and Interaction” which was established by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative.
The term “multimodal” describes the different types of digital information such as text, speech, images, video, graphics, and high-dimensional data, and the way it is perceived and communicated, particularly through vision, hearing, and human expression. The challenge is now to organize, understand, and search this multimodal information in a robust, efficient and intelligent way, and to create dependable systems that allow natural and intuitive multimodal interaction. We are looking for highly motivated young researchers with a background in the research areas of the cluster, including algorithmic foundations, secure and autonomous networked systems, open science web, information processing in the life sciences, visual computing, large-scale virtual environments, synthetic virtual characters, text and speech processing and multimodal dialog systems. Additional information on the Cluster of Excellence is available on http://www.m2ci.org. Group leaders will receive junior faculty status at Saarland University, including the right to supervise Bachelor, Master and PhD students. Positions are limited to five years.
Applicants for W1 positions (phase I of the program) must have completed an outstanding PhD. Upon successful evaluation after two years, W1 group leaders are eligible for promotion to W2. Direct applicants for W2 positions (phase II of the program) must have completed a postdoc stay and must have demonstrated outstanding research potential and the ability to successfully lead their own research group. Junior research groups are equipped with a budget of 80k to 100k Euros per year to cover research personnel and other costs.
Saarland University has leading departments in computer science and computational linguistics, with more than 200 PhD students working on topics related to the cluster (see http://www.informatik-saarland.de for additional information). The German Excellence Initiative recently awarded multi-million grants to the Cluster of Excellence “Multimodal Computing and Interaction” as well as to the “Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science”. An important factor to this success were the close ties to the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, which are co-located on the same campus.
Candidates should submit their application (curriculum vitae, photograph, list of publications, short research plan, copies of degree certificates, copies of the five most important publications, list of five references) to the coordinator of the cluster, Prof. Hans-Peter Seidel, MPI for Computer Science, Campus E1 4, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany. Please, also send your application as a single PDF file to applications@mmci.uni-saarland.de.
The review of applications will begin on January 15, 2009, and applicants are strongly encouraged to submit applications by that date; however, applications will continue to be accepted until January 31, 2009. Final decisions will be made following a candidate symposium that will be held during March 9 – 13, 2009.
Saarland University is an equal opportunity employer. In accordance with its policy of increasing the proportion of women in this type of employment, the University actively encourages applications from women. For candidates with equal qualification, preference will be given to people with physical disabilities.
