Two PhD positions in deep learning for natural language processing W/M

Company

Idiap is an independent, not-for-profit, research institute accredited and funded by the Swiss Federal Government, the State of Valais, and the City of Martigny.

Idiap offers competitive salaries and working conditions at all levels in a dynamic, multicultural environment. Idiap is an equal opportunity employer. We specifically encourage women and minorities to apply.

Idiap is located in the town of Martigny in Valais, Switzerland, offering exceptional quality of life, exciting recreational activities, including hiking, climbing and skiing, as well as varied cultural activities. It is within close proximity to Lausanne and Geneva. Although Idiap is located in the French part of Switzerland, English is the official working language.

For frequently asked questions (FAQs) about living in Switzerland, please go to https://www.idiap.ch/en/faq

Job description

Idiap Research Institute seeks qualified candidates for two PhD student positions at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing. These researchers will investigate representation learning for language, as part of a Swiss NSF project building on our recent Bayesian extension of Transformers. Our nonparametric variational Bayesian framework provides novel insights into attention-based models and has demonstrated important advantages, which we will leverage and extend to develop new deep learning architectures and investigate their interpretability, controllability and applications.

The successful PhD candidates will join the Natural Language Understanding group at Idiap, under the supervision of Dr. James Henderson. They will also become doctoral students at EPFL conditional on parallel application to, and acceptance by, the EPFL Doctoral School. Appointment for a PhD position is for a maximum of 4 years, provided successful progress, and should lead to a dissertation.

Starting date is to be negotiated, but expected to be May-October 2024. All queries related to the advertised position can be sent to Dr. James Henderson (james.henderson@idiap.ch).

Idiap takes gender balance and diversity seriously in our hiring decisions.

Sought profil

The ideal PhD candidates should hold a Masters degree in computer science, artificial intelligence, or related fields.
She or he should have a background in machine learning, and experience in natural language processing would be a plus. The applicant should also have strong mathematical and programming skills.

Required languages

• English - Level advanced

Réf: eb7a4e7c-f3de-41b6-87c6-d63f01677ecb