The Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities is looking for an Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Language and Cognition. You will provide education in a dynamic context with ample opportunities for the development of innovative teaching methods. You have a proven track record of teaching in theoretical philosophy in particular in philosophy of cognition, philosophy of language and logic. You have demonstrable experience with teaching at both BA and MA level, including teaching to diverse student groups from different disciplines.

To mark its relaunch the VvL (Dutch Association for Logic and Philosophy of Exact Sciences) has the privilege to announce its first outreach event in 2021. It will take place on Friday 28 May 2021. We are very pleased to announce that Professor Moshe Y. Vardi (Rice University) will give a public lecture entitled And Logic Begat Computer Science.

This event will take place online using Zoom. The talk will be followed first by a short session where invited commentators will react to it, and later by a general Q & A session with the audience. The outreach event will be concluded by a social gathering on the virtual platform Gather.Town.

Registration is free, but necessary to receive links to Zoom and Gather.Town.

The Department of Media Studies is looking for an Assistant Professor in New Media & Information.

You are an active researcher and have a strong research expertise in the use of computational and digital methods for Media Studies, focusing on social media and digital culture including e.g. the spread of (mis)information and social media manipulation/influence. Your research will be part of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), which together with the different research schools of the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research represents UvA’s research in the Humanities. The position will be embedded within the Department of Media Studies.

The field of Computational Humanities (CH) is blossoming, with progress being made in all humanities and social science disciplines. Thanks to the increasing availability of digital data and advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the humanities are rapidly transforming. On the one hand, computational approaches are being applied to both long-standing as well as novel questions in the humanities; on the other hand, CH contributions are finding their way to society at large. Areas of interest include understanding human activities on social and online media, including (fake) news and other information flows; explainable and interpretable AI; digital archiving; fairness, accountability and transparency in online communication and other societal processes. The focus of this position will be on Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications related to CH, with a methodological scope spanning text mining, information retrieval and machine learning.

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) has a PhD position in natural language processing: modelling implicit bias and stereotype.

The PhD position is part of Robert van Rooij’s research project From Learning to Meaning: A new approach to generic sentences and implicit biases, which is funded by NWO, and also involves a postdoctoral position. This PhD position will be jointly supervised by Robert van Rooij and Ekaterina Shutova.

The project overall: generic sentences ('Birds fly’, ‘Sharks are dangerous’) are omnipresent in language and express characterising properties of groups and individual objects. As they communicate (stereo)typical (‘Lawyers are greedy’) and normative (‘Winners never quit’) information, these sentences give voice to and transmit socially prejudiced generalisations and thus can have a high societal impact. Despite their importance, no uniform and empirically adequate account of their meaning yet exists. The goal of the whole project is to develop such an account, by linking their meaning to how we learn to associate characteristic properties of groups or individuals. This is an interdisciplinary project, which is a collaboration between researchers in semantics, natural language processing (NLP) and experimental psychology.

The ILLC is very pleased to announce that Floris Roelofsen has been awarded an NWO Vici for his project entitled I can't hear you|could you repeat the question in sign language please?

The language barrier between deaf and hearing people hinders smooth communication and leads to social inequality and exclusion. Roelofsen will investigate the form and interpretation of questions in sign languages, and apply the obtained insights to develop a machine translation system and training sessions for sign language interpreters.

[Dutch only]

Artificiële intelligentie moet ons leven verrijken, maar er niet mee aan de haal gaan. Het moet zich houden aan door mensen gehanteerde logica en principes voor rationaliteit, moraliteit en consistentie. Kortom, wij willen machinaal handelen kunnen begrijpen en sturen. Mens en machine moeten elkaar in voldoende mate verstaan om op de gewenste manier met elkaar om te gaan.

Vier sprekers (Catholijn Jonker, Jan Broersen, Rineke Verbrugge en Bart Jacobs) leggen uit welke rol logica, in combinatie met probabilistisch denken, speelt in het onderzoek naar de vervulling van deze wensen.

Prof. Robert Brandom holds the Spinoza Chair at the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities during the second term of the academic year 2020-2021. Prof. Brandom will be delivering the Spinoza Lectures under the title of 'Fetishism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and the Second Enlightenment: Rorty and Hegel on Representation and Reality.'

Prof. Robert Brandom holds the Spinoza Chair at the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities during the second term of the academic year 2020-2021. Prof. Brandom will be delivering the Spinoza Lectures under the title of 'Fetishism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and the Second Enlightenment: Rorty and Hegel on Representation and Reality.'