28 September: FYI -- PhD funding, Dialogue ML (Saarbruecken, DE)

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PhD position: Privacy-respecting dialog systems using ML
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(Computational Linguistics, Computer Science or similar)

Conversational interfaces based on deep learning are becoming more and
more ubiquitous. However, the massive amounts of stored speech and
text data that is needed for training state-of-the-art models raises
serious privacy concerns for its users. Each spoken message may
potentially reveal information about the user's personality, may
contain critical information (credit card numbers, passwords, etc.),
and may convey sensitive information (ethnicity, age, health status,
etc.). Voice recordings may even be malevolently used to build
synthesized voiced to impersonate users.

The Spoken Language Systems group at Saarland University is seeking
new ways to provide dialog technology that is "private by design" by
means such as e.g. privacy-preserving machine learning. To this end,
we are anticipating the availability of a PhD position starting at the
beginning of 2019.

Ideal candidates for the position would have:

1. A good understanding of NLP and dialog phenomena

2. Excellent knowledge of machine learning

3. Excellent programming skills

4. Experience with architecting large systems.

Salary: The PhD position will be 75% of full time on the German E13
scale (TV-L) which is about 2890€ per month before tax and insurances.
The appointments will be for three years with possible extensions
subject to follow-up funding.

About the department: The department of Language Science and
Technology is one of the leading departments in the speech and
language area in Europe. The flagship project at the moment is the CRC
on Information Density and Linguistic Encoding. Furthermore, the
department is involved in the cluster of excellence Multimodal
Computing and Interaction. It also runs a significant number of
European and nationally funded projects. In total it has seven faculty
and around 50 postdoctoral researchers and PhD students.

How to apply:

Please send us: a letter of motivation, your CV, your transcripts, if
available a list of publications, and the names and contact
information of at least two references, as a single PDF or a link to a
PDF if the file size is more than 3 MB.

Please apply by October 10th, 2018.

Contact: Applications and any further inquiries regarding the project
should be directed to:

*Thomas.Kleinbauer@lsv.uni-saarland.de
*Dietrich.Klakow@lsv.uni-saarland.de

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