Postdoctoral Researcher: Brain-inspired Machine Learning (junior) at the Donders Centre for Cognition

Updated: about 2 years ago
Deadline: today

Would you like to contribute to the development of human-like AI systems and new intelligent technology? Then you have a part to play as a junior postdoctoral researcher at the Donders Centre for Cognition. Join an exciting and vibrant young team of experts in machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics, take leadership responsibilities and considerably increase your research network. 

The Donders Institute is looking for an early career postdoctoral researcher on brain-inspired machine learning for DEEPSELF,  a joint project between the Donders Institute (Netherlands, supervision: Pablo Lanillos) and Tübingen University (Germany, supervision: Martin Butz), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). DEEPSELF is an interdisciplinary project that aims to study the emergence of the agency metacognition ability by learning hierarchical predictive encodings of events.

As a postdoctoral researcher, you will be in charge of developing new brain-inspired machine learning models to allow a robot to learn hierarchical event codes from sensorimotor experience and plan future actions using these event codes. These metacognitive abilities will be tested in robotic experiments investigating the emergence of  ‘agency’ on three levels of abstraction based on human science findings. Agency appears to enable us to learn, discern and anticipate the consequences of our actions. What should be the internal representation that the agent should learn to plan in different temporal scales? And how we can enable robots to answer "Did I do it?". These are some of the questions that will be addressed in the DeepSelf project, which is framed in the concepts of Hierachical Deep Learning, Event Segmentation Theory, Robot learning, Metacognition and Agency.

You will work in an international project team in close collaboration with two PhD candidates and the principal investigators. You will join an exciting and vibrant young team of experts in machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics, and become part of a big community of ~20 interdisciplinary research projects under the Active Self DFG priority programme umbrella. Thus, you will have the opportunity to take leadership responsibilities and considerably increase the research network. Furthermore, you will participate in summer schools and events organised within the framework of the priority programme. After completion of the project, you will have opportunities to continue in academia and industry.

We strongly encourage submissions from different representative minorities.



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