COMPUTER SCIENCE     

Postdoctoral Position in Human Robot Interaction

www.qatar.cmu.edu/~msakr/postdoc_hri

The School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar invites applications for a postdoctoral fellow positions in NLP/Human Robot Interaction. The position will be based on the Qatar campus within the Human-Robot Interaction Lab, which includes collaboration with the Pittsburgh campus and potential travel between the two. The research will be conducted under the supervision of Prof. Majd F. Sakr. Candidates are also encouraged to explore research ideas on top and beyond the project description. The position provides significant opportunities for professional development.

The project involves enhancing the nature of interactions, within a multicultural environment, with a bi-lingual Robot Receptionist. Applicants are expected to have an understanding of:

  • Good math background (probability/statistics)
  • Semantic language parsing and user interaction modeling
  • Ability to write, maintain and debug clean code; preferably in C, C++, and Python, in a Linux enviornment

Basically, most of these keywords should mean something to you: supervised/unsupervised learning, chunking and parsing, IPC/sockets, Stanford parser, named-entity recognition, Linguistic Data Consortium, C++/STL/Boost, WordNet, tcpdump, netcat, anophora resolution.

We want an NLP star who can do 1) the bi-lingual aspects (standard Arabic, English) 2) develop the treebanks/corpora to grow and train the new version of the parsing/machine learning tools. 3)Candidate can help with culture-specific language models for semantic disambiguation and 4)Write code.

This posting will stay open until filled. Early expressions of interest are encouraged.

Position in Qatar

In 2004, Carnegie Mellon University established a branch campus in Qatar with the goal of promoting the same high standards of research and education as its original Pittsburgh campus. CMU Qatar is located in Education City, an ultramodern 2,500 acre campus which currently hosts branches of six of the world's leading universities. The campus provides cutting research facilities in a dynamic and multidisciplinary environment.

Carnegie Mellon Qatar is located in Qatar's capital, Doha, an up-and-coming modern city with easy access to the world. Qatar is a small country on the East coast of the Arabian peninsula. Its abundant reserves of natural gas have resulted in it having a GDP per capita among the highest in the world. It is cosmopolitan, vibrant, yet pleasant and safe. Further resources:

The position in Qatar offers a competitive salary, a foreign service premium, excellent international health care coverage, and allowances for housing, transportation, and travel. Benefits may vary with contract type. The position comes with support for conferences and equipment.