Open Postdoctoral position, faculty mentor Judith Fan

HAI Postdoctoral Fellow: Cognitively-Inspired AI for Grounded Abstraction Learning, Professor Judith Fan
We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher who will be housed in the Cognitive Tools Lab in the Department of Psychology, advised by Professor Judith Fan. The central goal of our lab is to reverse-engineer humans' ability to rapidly discover and deploy useful abstractions in a variety of real-world settings, from science and engineering to philosophy and law. Our work aims to uncover the fundamental mechanisms that have enabled humans to deploy these cognitive tools in such innovative ways to learn, share knowledge, and create new things.
Project Description
The postdoctoral fellow will lead a project to develop cognitively inspired AI systems that can discover ad hoc abstractions to support natural communication and collaboration with humans. This project will comprise two highly related aims.
The first component of this project will entail developing grounded, joint vision and language-understanding systems with the capacity to learn ad hoc construals of physical scenes that depend on current goals. The second component of this project entails developing AI systems that are capable of coordinating with other agents on shared ad hoc construals to enable successful collaboration on long-horizon physical reasoning challenges. This effort will seek to harness insights from how humans use both natural language and other communication modalities to learn shared representations about entities, actions, and possibilities.
The ideal candidate will be well prepared to lead a deeply interdisciplinary research program, synthesizing approaches from psychology, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, computer vision, and human-computer interaction. In addition, the fellow will be encouraged to participate in cross-disciplinary collaborations between Stanford's AI, Psychology, Vision, Robotics, Natural Language Processing, and Human-Computer Interaction communities.
Mentor Structure
The postdoctoral fellow will be mentored by Professor Judith Fan.
Stanford HAI is also committed to creating a diverse community of scholars who are engaged in contributing to the understanding and advancement of Human-Centered AI. Postdoctoral fellows will have the opportunity to engage with one another and with the broader Stanford HAI research community. They are also expected to participate in professional development, cohort-building, and other programmatic activities organized by HAI.
Evaluation Criteria
Researchers will be selected based on the following considerations:

• Relevant prior research experience. Interdisciplinarity of research track record should be demonstrated via prior publications in relevant venues in cognitive science, psychology, or computer science.
• Potential of the individual to add value to and gain benefit from the Stanford HAI community.
• Record of successfully producing ambitious, interdisciplinary projects independently.
  

Timeline

• Application Deadline: March 20, 2024 (Applicants advancing in the review process may be asked to submit additional materials, including letters of recommendation, and may be invited to interview.)
• Selections will be made by mid-April 2024.
• This is a 1-year appointment starting Fall 2024.