22 June: fyi -- research, NY
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The Human-Level Intelligence Laboratory at Rensselaer has just been awarded
a MURI grant on 'Unified Theories of Language and Cognition'. As a
consequence, we have funding for several postdoctoral positions. (We also
have graduate student and research programmer positions).
The project aims to develop a unified computational theory of language use
that significantly expands the ability of computers to understand language
and explains how people use background knowledge and context to achieve
deep understanding of language even when it is highly ambiguous, novel,
ungrammatical and/or metaphorical. Many aspects of this problem (for
example, the reasoning algorithms and ontologies involved) are not specific
to language and thus an interest in language is not strictly necessary to
participate.
Rensselaer is located in the Hudson Valley, equidistant from Boston and New
York City. It is conceivable that we could work something out with someone
who is constrained to reside near one of those cities.
Our primary criterion for bringing new people into the lab is the
intelligence, curiosity, energy and motivation needed to solve the problems
involved in this project. Background in one or more of the following
areas, would help, though is not necessary:
- Linguistics. Formal syntax and semantics, construction grammars and
pragmatics are especially relevant.
- Reasoning algorithms. Our work integrates multiple forms of reasoning
algorithms, including those based on first-order logic, SAT, probability
theory and analogy.
- Ontologies. Our approach is knowledge-intensive and will require the
ability to acquire and organize this knowledge.
- Semantic Web. We will be interfacing with information available in many
machine-readable, distributed knowledge bases. There are many interesting
problems involved in using this information for reasoning and language
understanding.
- Software engineering. All our work is integrated within a single
cognitive architecture. This presents several interesting software
engineering challenges.
If you are interested in a position, please send an email to the
application email listed below.
Application Deadline: 30-Sep-2009
Email Address for Applications: cassin@rpi.edu
Contact Information
Cassimatis
Email: cassin@rpi.edu
Web Address: http://www.rpi.edu/
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