2 PhD positions in NLP and ML for healthcare

12 Mar 2024
Job Information

Organisation/Company

Amsterdam UMC

Research Field

Medical sciences

Researcher Profile

First Stage Researcher (R1)

Country

Netherlands

Application Deadline

16 Mar 2024 - 22:59 (UTC)

Type of Contract

Temporary

Job Status

Not Applicable

Hours Per Week

36.0

Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme?

Not funded by an EU programme

Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?

No

Offer Description

You will join the "CaRe-NLP: Human-Centric and Responsible NLP methods for Dutch healthcare" project. CaRe-NLP's main goal is to develop human-centric and responsible NLP and ML methods for healthcare in the Netherlands, Europe, and worldwide. CaRe-NLP's focus is methodological, meaning you will focus on developing, building, and testing state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) that ensure privacy and fairness, prevent bias, cope with data scarcity, and are interpretable and explainable.

You will tackle relevant clinical problems and develop methods for non-English (including Dutch) healthcare data that include (combinations of) free-text clinical notes collected in primary/secondary/intensive care settings, medical images, time series measurements, medical knowledge graphs, and multi-modal electronic heath records (EHRs).

We currently offer 2 PhD positions: PhD-clinical and PhD-synthetic. In both positions you will be responsible for developing, building and testing Large Language Models.

PhD-clinical: Your focus will be on using LLMs to tackle multiple clinical problems with a focus on the Dutch healthcare and using real patient records from the Amsterdam UMC.

PhD-synthetic: Your focus will be on using LLMs to build differentially-private generative models for synthetic data generation of patient electronic health records (EHRs) that include free text.

Furthermore, within both positions you will:

• Liaise with a network of clinical partners of the CaRe-NLP project and will tackle relevant healthcare problems using rich real-world clinical data;
• Have access to excellent HPC facilities and strong support to publish the results of your work in the best scientific conferences and journals in NLP, ML, AI, and healthcare in general;
• Have the opportunity to contribute to the mentoring of master's students.

Clearly state the position you are applying for: PhD-clinical, PhD-synthetic, or both.

Requirements
Specific Requirements

Prerequisites:

• MSc degree in Computer Science, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or related disciplines:
• Strong technical background and good experience with Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning methods, toolkits, and best practices:
• Experience with pretraining and adapting LLMs using large datasets and/or differential privacy and/or privacy-preserving learning with neural networks and/or generative models (e.g. LLMs, VAEs, GANs, diffusion models):
• Strong programming skills in Python and ML libraries (PyTorch):
• Responsible, independent and resilient mindset and fluenct in English.

Not required but helpful:

• Experience with clinical data and related application areas (e.g., cancer, primary/intensive care):
• Experience with data processing pipelines and with pre-training/fine-tuning/deploying Large Language Models in HPC:
• Contribution to open-source projects.

Additional Information
Benefits

• 2 fully-funded PhD positions. For each fully-funded PhD position, we offer a contract for one year (12 months) with the intention to extend for another 36 months upon good performance evaluation.
• Salary scale OiO: € 2.901 - € 3.677 with a 36 hour week (depending on qualifications and experience).
• Besides a good salary you will receive an 8.3% end-of-year bonus and 8% holiday allowance.
• Pension accrual with BeFrank, a modern, understandable and fairly priced pension.
• Excellent accessibility by public transport and reimbursement of a large part of your travel expenses. We also have plenty of parking spaces at the AMC location and a good bicycle scheme.

Additional comments

Applications will be considered until March 15. Intended start date: April 15 or as soon as possible thereafter.

During the publication period, applications will be handled continuously. If the vacancies are filled, they will be closed prematurely.
If you have any questions about this position, please feel free to contact Iacer Calixto, via [email protected] .

For more information about the application procedure, please contact Chey Edwards, Recruitment Advisor, via [email protected] or via +31 6 214 87 245.

A reference check, screening and hiring test may be part of the procedure. Read here whether that applies to you. If you join us, we ask you for a VOG (Certificate of Good Conduct).

Internal candidates will be given priority over external candidates in case of equal suitability.

Acquisition in response to this vacancy is not appreciated.

Website for additional job details

https://www.academictransfer.com/338330/

Work Location(s)

Number of offers available

2

Company/Institute

Amsterdam UMC

Country

Netherlands

City

Amsterdam

Postal Code

1105AZ

Street

Meibergdreef 9

Geofield

Where to apply

Website

https://www.academictransfer.com/en/338330/2-phd-positions-in-nlp-and-ml-for-he…

Contact

City

Amsterdam Zuidoost

Website

https://www.amsterdamumc.org/

Street

Meibergdreef 9

Postal Code

1105 AZ

STATUS: EXPIRED