PhD or Postdoc position in Computational Social Science / Digital Democracy and Human-Centered AI

In der aktuellen Covid-19 Situation laufen die Rekrutierungen weiter. Es kann dabei allerdings zu Verzögerungen kommen. Vielen Dank für Ihr Verständnis.

100%, Zurich, fixed-term

Research at the Professorship of Computational Social Science (COSS) is focused on:

bringing modeling and computer simulation of social processes and transportation phenomena together with technology, experimental, and data-driven work,

combining the perspectives of different scientific disciplines (e.g. social science, computer science, complexity science and sociophysics),

bridging fundamental and applied work,

developing digital tools to support people and studying the resulting behavior.

Project background

Information about the COSS team and its projects can be found on our website: https://coss.ethz.ch/research/HumanEAINet.html and https://coss.ethz.ch/research/SNFDD.html .

Job description

The candidate would contribute to ambitious international research projects that aim to create novel research breakthroughs in the subject areas below connected to digital societies:

• Human-Centered AI: develop and demonstrate novel machine learning approaches that can benefit society
• Digital Democracy: develop or extend and experiment with a simple demo platform for digitally assisted collective intelligence and/or participatory budgeting and/or co-creation and/or alternative voting schemes

Please visit our webpages for more information about our projects.

For Postdocs the initial contract would usually last for 2 years and may be extended. For the PhD position, the employment period would typically be 3 to 4 years altogether, if the PhD Research Plan successfully passes the review and adequate progress is made.

Your profile

The candidate should have an excellent research background in computational social science, complexity science, computer science, data science, and/or socio-physics, with a strong international publication track record in one of the areas mentioned above. (Please provide links to your bachelor and master thesis, and any further publications you may have (if any).

Excellent scientific and computational skills, English language skills, social skills, and international experience are required. We expect the candidate to appreciate collaborating in a diverse, interdisciplinary and multicultural team to jointly and systematically address grand scientific challenges.

Please indicate, whether you are also skilled and willing to develop a software platform of reasonable complexity or a smartphone app, or able to develop parallel code for parallel processing on supercomputers, and what software environments you are using for this.

ETH Zurich

ETH Zurich is one of the world’s leading universities specialising in science and technology. We are renowned for our excellent education, cutting-edge fundamental research and direct transfer of new knowledge into society. Over 30,000 people from more than 120 countries find our university to be a place that promotes independent thinking and an environment that inspires excellence. Located in the heart of Europe, yet forging connections all over the world, we work together to develop solutions for the global challenges of today and tomorrow.

Working, teaching and research at ETH Zurich