Postdoctoral research position (commonsense reasoning)

lystdoUID: 3410407

Job description
Applications are invited for a Research Associate post in the School of Computer Science & Informatics at Cardiff University. This is a full-time, fixed-term post for 30 months, starting on 1 February 2016 or as soon as possible thereafter. The successful candidate will have the ability and enthusiasm to undertake world-class research in the field of Artificial Intelligence and will possess a PhD in Computer Science or a closely related area, or have equivalent experience.

The aim of this post will be to develop methods for commonsense reasoning based on a combination of symbolic knowledge and vector-space embeddings. While symbolic reasoning has traditionally been the predominant paradigm for commonsense reasoning, purely symbolic methods often struggle with the messiness of real-world knowledge. Vector-space embeddings of knowledge bases, on the other hand, have proven very useful for implementing flexible methods of reasoning, but their data-driven nature makes them unsuitable for reasoning about rare concepts and entities, and the resulting inference processes can be difficult to interpret or debug. Thus there is a need for a unified approach to commonsense reasoning, which combines the flexibility of vector-space embeddings with the transparency of symbolic approaches.

This research will be part of an ERC funded project on flexible reasoning.

Closing date for applications: 10 November 2015

Essential criteria
1.   A PhD in Computer Science or closely related area, or equivalent experience.
2.   Proven ability to undertake research in a relevant area (e.g. knowledge representation and reasoning, neural networks, statistical relational learning), at an international level, as evidenced by research output.
3.   Excellent programming skills (java, python or C/C++).
4.   Strong background in formal logic and linear algebra.
5.   A demonstrable history of contributing to excellent publications in relevant top-tier conferences (e.g. IJCAI, KR, AAAI, NIPS) and journals (e.g. Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Machine Learning, Journal of Machine Learning Research).
6.   Proven ability to communicate specialist ideas, both orally and in writing.
7.   Ability to understand and apply for competitive research funding.
8.   Proven ability to demonstrate creativity and innovation within work.
9.   Knowledge of current status of research in specialist field.
10. Excellent organisational skills with a proven ability to work independently and be self-managing, to prioritise your work and meet deadlines within the framework of an agreed programme.

Desirable criteria
1.   Experience with implementing tools for automated reasoning.
2.   Experience with formulating and solving convex optimisation problems.
3.   Experience with training neural networks.
4.   Experience with using a high-performance computing environment.

More information
For more details about the project and instructions on how to apply, please go to www.cardiff.ac.uk/jobs and search for job 3939BR. Please note the requirement to evidence all essential criteria in the supporting statement.