Post-doc positions at Microsoft-INRIA Joint Lab, Saclay, France: Sept. 2011 – Aug. 2013

Two 24-months post-doctoral positions concerned with the application of Machine Learning methods to Search and Optimization are opened. The positions will be held at the Microsoft-INRIA joint laboratory at Saclay, (20km south of Paris), France.

Topic:
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The context of the work is to learn efficient solving strategies on top of existing Constraint-based or Meta-heuristics optimization algorithms.

A key challenge today for Constraint solvers is to be able to reformulate an existing CSP efficiently until the problem becomes obviously solvable or unsolvable. One possible topic of the post-doc will be to turn the reformulation of a given CSP into a reinforcement learning problem: define the state and actions spaces, and investigate the feasibility of learning a good reformulation strategy.

Another possible research direction is to identify the context of competence of specific heuristics within the search, and to use the gained knowledge to define heuristics selection strategies.

Profile:
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We are looking for PhD computer scientists with strong knowledge in at least one the following fields: Machine Learning and Data Mining (Reinforcement Learning, Monte-Carlo Tree Search, …), Constraint Solving (exact and stochastic Optimization, Meta-Heuristics, …). Strong programming skills are mandatory. A sound experience of existing CSP solvers will be appreciated.

Duration and remuneration:
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– 12+12 months contract, starting from September 2011.
– net salary: approx. 2100 Euros per month (health insurance included).

Application:
============
Please send your application (PDF format) as soon as possible.
Screening of applications starts immediately and continues until the position is filled.

Send cover letter including names of at least two references, CV and links to PhD dissertation (or draft) and up to three most relevant publications to the following emails:
youssefh[at]microsoft[dot]com
marc[dot]schoenau[at]inria[dot]fr
michele[dot]sebag[at]lri[dot]fr

Job openings in machine learning in India

Aspiring Minds, a three year old MIT alumnus founded start-up is looking to hire both interns and full-time people in the areas of machine learning and statistical modeling. Our core work is in matching graduating students to jobs through a detailed assessment of their capabilities and skills. The proposition is being able to predict at the time of hiring whether the applicant will succeed in a given job role (say a sales role). The assessment product and the predictive matching algorithm heavily use learning and optimization algorithms. More than 250,000 graduating students across India take our standardized test, AMCAT to make themselves and their skills visible to corporates. This helps the students get an interview opportunity and eventually a job matching his/her skill set. The corporates are able to identify and locate talent, which was hidden to them till now. A good job-matching algorithm helps making the labour (job) market more efficient and enable fair return to human capital.

The full-time position is a leadership role in developing the next generation products at Aspiring Mind such as automatic speech quality assessment, automatic essay grading and developing algorithms to learn predictive models constrained by a given grammar. The idea is not just to be able to make the best model with the available parameters, but to discover new parameters (or features) with predictive power, find ways to measure it and deploy them in products. The employee will work with a team of research engineers at Aspiring Minds. Ideally, a candidate with strong expertise in both theoretical and practical aspects of machine learning is best suited for the position.

Apply now: Please find details of the job role followed by a blurb on Aspiring Minds’ concept and current progress at http://www.aspiringminds.in/rnd_job.php. If you are interested in working with us, directly email varun(at)aspiringminds.in We can have detailed discussions on your potential role and opportunities. The job location is Gurgaon, India.

Postdoc position on Learning Graph Grammars

A postdoc position for one year is open to the Hubert Curien Laboratory (Saint-Etienne
– France) on the theme of “Learning Graph Grammars”.
Description of the job : http://labh-curien.univ-st-etienne.fr/~fj/postDocPositionLaHC.html

The deadline for application is June 13, 2011 so if you are interested please contact me
urgently by email.

Best regards
François Jacquenet

Bayes-250 workshop

BAYES-250 WORKSHOP
Edinburgh, Scotland
5-7 Sept 2011
http://conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk/bayes250

The Schools of Mathematics and of Informatics at The University of
Edinburgh are holding a research workshop to mark the 250th
anniversary of the death of Thomas Bayes, a former student of the
University of Edinburgh. The workshop will run from early afternoon
on Monday 5th to late morning on Wednesday 7th September. The general
theme of the workshop is that of what has come to be known as Bayesian
statistics.

David Dunson (Duke University, USA) will be giving a keynote lecture.
Other confirmed workshop speakers include: Christophe Andrieu
(Bristol), Zoubin Ghahramani (Cambridge), Michael Goldstein (Durham),
Simon Godsill (Cambridge), Peter Green (Bristol), Chris Holmes
(Oxford), Neil Lawrence (Sheffield), Carl Rasmussen (Cambridge),
Christian Robert (Paris), Jim Smith (Warwick), Darren Wilkinson (Newcastle),
John Winn (Cambridge).

There will also be a general interest public lecture in the late
afternoon of Monday 5th September by Professor David Spiegelhalter
FRS, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at The
University of Cambridge, at which all attending the workshop are
invited to attend.

There are a number of places still open for attendance at the
workshop. Participation is by invitation only. We encourage anyone who
is interested to apply for an invitation by sending an
email to bayes250app(at)gmail.com with the following information.

Name:
Affiliation:
Position:
Web site:
Please indicate if you are a PhD student, postdoc, or early career researcher.
Dietary requirements for lunch:
Please give a few sentences about your reasons for requesting attendance.

For full consideration applications should be received by Thursday 23
June. There is no registration fee. However, we regret that we do
not have funds available to cover the travel or accommodation of
participants.

For more information see
http://conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk/bayes250/

Colin Aitken (School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh)
Charles Sutton (School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh)
Chris Williams (School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh)

Tenure track positions at the Australian National University

There are two positions available at level B or C (lecturer or senior lecturer level) in the Research School of Computer Science at the ANU

More details available at
http://jobs.anu.edu.au/PositionDetail.aspx?p=2043

Post-doc Position in Sheffield ML Group

There is a two year post-doctoral position available at the University
of Sheffield, UK to work with Magnus Rattray and Neil Lawrence on
machine learning methods applied to computational biology data. The
project is part of a European-wide consortium with collaborators in
Germany, Finland and the Netherlands. The successful applicant will
join an active group based in a new building (opened November 2010) as
part of the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience.

More details on the application are available here:

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ACS473/research-associate/

The post is funded as part of a large inter-disciplinary European
consortium project on systems approaches to gene regulation biology
through nuclear receptors (SYNERGY) which has been funded under the
EraSysBio+ initiative.

If you want further details please contact Neil or Magnus.

CHiME 2011: Call for Participation — September 1st, 2011

First International Workshop on
Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME 2011)

in conjunction with Interspeech 2011
September 1st, 2011, Florence, Italy

http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/chime/workshop

*PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME AND REGISTRATION*
http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/projects/chime/workshop/programme.html
http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/projects/chime/workshop/registration.html

*OVERVIEW*
CHiME 2011 is an ISCA-approved satellite workshop of Interspeech 2011 that will consider the challenge of developing machine listening applications for operation in real-world multisource environments. CHiME will bring together researchers from a broad range of disciplines (computational hearing, blind source separation, speech recognition, machine learning) to discuss novel and established approaches to this problem. The cross-fertilisation of ideas will foster fresh approaches that efficiently combine the complementary strengths of each research field.

As a focus for discussion during the day, the workshop will act as host to the PASCAL CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge. This real-world challenge attracted 13 submissions from different research groups spanning all of the above disciplines. Many of these submissions achieved impressive keyword error rate reduction up to 80% compared to the baseline.

See the provisional list of accepted papers:
http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/projects/chime/workshop/programme.html

*REGISTRATION*
To register, please visit
http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/projects/chime/workshop/registration.html

The registration fee is 45 UK pounds (roughly 50 euros) and includes admission to the sessions, electronic proceedings, buffet lunch, and tee and coffee breaks. Registration must be made online by credit-card payment (there will be no onsite registration).

*VENUE*
The workshop is taking place at the Interspeech 2011 venue on the day after Interspeech finishes, Thursday 1st September. Information about accommodation and how to get to and from the venue can be found on the main Interspeech website
http://www.interspeech2011.org/conference/visitorinfo.php
http://www.interspeech2011.org/conference/accomodation.php

See you in Florence.

Best regards,

CHiME Organising Committee

Dr Jon Barker, University of Sheffield, UK
Dr Emmanuel Vincent, INRIA Rennes, France
Prof. Dan Ellis, Columbia University, USA
Prof. Phil Green, University of Sheffield, UK
Dr. John Hershey, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, USA
Prof. Walter Kellermann, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Prof. Hiroshi Okuno, Kyoto University, Japan

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Bayesian Machine Learning – University of Cambridge

We are seeking a highly creative and motivated postdoctoral Research Associate to join the Machine Learning Group (http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk) in the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK, working with Professor Zoubin Ghahramani. The research area for this position is Bayesian Machine Learning and the position is funded through an EPSRC project on Advanced Bayesian Computation for Cross-Disciplinary Research. The aim of this project is to develop novel algorithms for probabilistic modelling applicable across a range of physical, biological and social sciences. The project is a collaboration between Cambridge (Engineering), Warwick (Systems Biology), Sussex (Astronomy), and Kent (Statistics). The position will be for two years, starting September 1, 2011 or soon afterwards, with possible extension for a further year.

The successful applicant will have or be near completing a PhD in computer science, engineering, statistics or a related area, and will have extensive research experience and a strong publication record in statistics, probability, or machine learning. Preference will be given to applicants with some experience in large-scale modelling with Bayesian methods, non-parametric Bayesian models, and approximate inference.

Applications must be sent by email to Diane Unwin, dsu21(at)cam.ac.uk, and must include a brief letter of application, a CV including a list of publications in pdf format, and names and email addresses of 2-3 referees. The cover sheet for applications, PD18 is available from http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/personnel/forms/pd18/. Applications should be sent so as to reach us not later than ** July 5th, 2011. **

The University is committed to equality of opportunity

Zoubin Ghahramani
Professor of Information Engineering
University of Cambridge
http://learning.eng.cam.ac.uk/zoubin/

Open phd position: Multivariate data-driven diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease

The Cyclotron Research Centre (CRC) at the University of Liège is recruiting a PhD student with a background in engineering, biomedical engineering or computer sciences for a project on multivariate data-driven diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (see project description here)

Applications are welcome from overseas as well as from EU nationals (working languages in the laboratory are French and English). Employment can begin immediately. Salary is commensurate with that of PhD fellowships at the University of Liège. The project is initially funded for 2 years, with possibilities for further extension up to 4 years. The position will be advertised until filled. The CRC offer an exciting and friendly multi-disciplinary research environment with ample opportunities for training and collaboration, and excellent technical facilities.

Application should be made electronically. Please submit your CV, copies of all relevant degrees, a statement of interest, and the names and email addresses of two referees to the following address:
ggarraux(at)ulg.ac.be

MLMI Thematic Programme launch

We are pleased to announce the launch of the PASCAL2 “Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction” (MLMI) Thematic Programme. The objective of this theme is to explore the opportunities and challenges entailed by adapting conventional machine learning techniques to multimodal interactive systems and advanced man-machine interfaces. In particular, it will focus on the VideoLectures.NET repository and its need for advanced tools to give users the most appropriate material in a staged and accessible fashion.

PASCAL2 members are invited to apply for funding of events related to the MLMI theme. Please visit http://users.dsic.upv.es/~pascal2-upv for more details.

Best regards,
Alfons Juan