Dear colleague,


I send this posting to you as you or or someone you know might be
interesting in the following vacancy. Please distribute this to anyone
who might be interested.

Yours sincerely, Paul Vogt

This text is also available at
http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/employees/cml/vacancies/8100406.html.


Tilburg University is a specialized institute of learning and research,
with emphasis on social sciences and the humanities. It employs more
than 1600 people and has a student body of around 10,000. There are 19
colleges and 10 research institutes, which provide (postgraduate)
tuition and research of outstanding quality.

*Faculty of Arts*
In its education and research programme, the Faculty of Arts addresses
socially relevant domains in the field of language, communication,
information and literary culture. Important areas of interest are
business communication and digital media, discourse studies,
multilingualism in a multicultural society, culture and literature,
linguistics and artificial intelligence.

The section Computational Linguistics at Tilburg University (The
Netherlands) has, subject to the availability of financial resources, a
position available for a:

*RESEARCHER ON LANGUAGE EVOLUTION AND COMPUTATION (POSTDOC)*
(m/f, 38 hours a week, vacancy number 810.04.06)

*Project information*
The section Computational Linguistics at Tilburg University might
receive funding for 3 years for a postdoctoral researcher, starting 1
June 2004. The funding is part of a project entitled 'New and Emergent
World Models Through Individual, Evolutionary, and Social Learning' (NEW
TIES). This project is funded by the European Commission and is a joint
project with researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The
Netherlands), Napier University (Edinburgh, UK), University of Surrey
(UK), Eotvos Lorand University (Budapest, Hungary) and Tilburg
University. See http://www.cs.vu.nl/~gusz/newties/newties.html
<http://www.cs.vu.nl/%7Egusz/newties/newties.html> for the project
home-page.

NEW TIES is a highly ambitious project that aims at simulating the
evolution of cultures in large populations of multi-agent systems
through indivudual and social learning of, e.g., behavioural skills and
language. The experiments will be set in a large computer network based
on peer-to-peer technology and another part of the project will focus on
monitoring how the culture (including language) evolves.
Central to this project is the part that studies evolution of
communication, language and cooperation in a large scale multi-agent
society. The researcher in Tilburg will be responsible for implementing
this central part.

*Main tasks*
The researcher's task will focus on the design of computational
experiments concerning the origins and evolution of communication,
language and cooperation. These experiments will have to be carried out
both as a stand alone experiment and integrated with the contribution of
the other partners in the project. Important areas within the research
are scalability, the symbol grounding problem, the emergence of
communication as such and the origins of grammatical structures as
described in workpackage 3 of the project proposal
(http://www.cs.vu.nl/~gusz/newties/newties.html
<http://www.cs.vu.nl/%7Egusz/newties/newties.html>). Part of the
research will be carried out in Edinburgh. In addition, the researcher
will be responsible for the local organisation of the computer network
(not necessarily the computer support).

*Profile*
The ideal candidate is an enthousiastic instigator and has a strong
background in language evolution and computation, modelling multi-agent
systems (preferably language models), evolutionary computation, machine
learning, linguistics and/or psycholinguistics. Java programming skills
are a further advantage. The candidate should have finished (or is about
to finish) his/her Ph.D. in the field of artificial intelligence,
artificial life, computational linguistics or another relevant area with
the cognitive sciences.

*Terms of employment*
The collective labour agreement of Tilburg University applies. The
selected candidate will get a three years contract (full-time). Pay
classification is according to level of experience and expertise, with a
minimum of 2.179,-- and a maximum of 3.453,-- euro per month (salary
scale 10). Furthermore, the usual facilities (desk, computer, some
travel money) are offered, as well as support with housing,
immigrations, etc.

*Information*
For further information, please contact Dr. Paul Vogt email:
p.a.vogt@... <mailto:p.a.vogt@...>,
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~paulv <http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/%7Epaulv> or
consult the project's home page
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~gusz/newties/newties.html
<http://www.cs.vu.nl/%7Egusz/newties/newties.html>

*Applications*
Interested candidates should send in their application and CV before 26
April 2004 to: Tilburg University, Faculty of Arts, O.M. Zweekhorst,
M.A., Managing Director, Room U 40, P.O. Box 90153 5000 LE Tilburg The
Netherlands. Or by email: solliciterenFDL@...
<mailto:solliciterenFDL@...>.

It is the policy of the university to increase the number of women
employed. Also members of ethnic minority groups and handicapped are
especially invited to apply.

--
Dr. Paul Vogt
Researcher in Language Evolution and Computation
ILK / Computational Linguistics, Tilburg University
P.O.Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~paulv/





--
Dr. Paul Vogt
Researcher in Language Evolution and Computation
ILK / Computational Linguistics, Tilburg University
P.O.Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands
Tel: +31 13 4662787 Fax: +31 13 4663110
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~paulv/