News and Events: Open Positions

Political irony in public discourse (e.g., in political satire) is often misunderstood, and appreciated only by recipients in agreement with the speaker. Irony may be marked in various ways, for instance through prosody and hyperbole, but the role and form of such markers is unclear. Our project comprises three stages, in which we study:

the use of irony markers through computational analysis;their functions through cognitive modeling, andtheir communicative effects through experiments.

Together, these findings enrich theories on language, communication and cognition, and help in assessing the ways in which irony leads to misinformation and polarization. The project is highly interdisciplinary, combining elements from the linguistics literature on irony and prosody with communication-scientific insights into political satire and cognitive-scientific insights into processing.

This position is part of the Collective Information Project, which will eventually employ a total of five junior researchers. It is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under the VICI scheme.

The aim of the Collective Information Project is to improve our understanding of how best to aggregate information supplied by several independent agents and how the structural properties of the kind of information we wish to aggregate influences the performance of different aggregation mechanisms. Potential applications range from political elections and recommender systems (aggregation of preferences), to crowdsourcing campaigns (aggregation of expert judgments), to knowledge engineering (aggregation of ontologies).

We are looking for an exceptional postdoctoral researcher in the area of Semantics and Computational Modeling within the project ' Cognitive Semantics and Quantities’ [CoSaQ]. Computational Modeling of Quantification' . This is a 5-year project (2017-2021) funded with 1.500.000 Euros by the European Research Council, and led by Principal Investigator (PI) Jakub Szymanik.

We are looking to fill one postdoc position in Language and Computation within the project EXPRESS: From the Expression of Disagreement to New Foundations for Expressivist Semantics (see Express). This is a five-year project funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and led by Dr Luca Incurvati (Principal Investigator). The project aims to develop a novel theory and logic of the way disagreement is expressed in dialogue. This theory will then be used to establish a novel approach to natural language semantics, inferential expressivism.

Delft University of Technology is recruiting an Assistant or Associate Professor in Data-driven Algorithmic Decision Making in the Algorithmics Group. The group's research goals are to design, and understand fundamental properties of, planning and coordination algorithms for intelligent decision making in real-world applications.

The Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1287 "Limits of Variability in Language: Cognitive, Grammatical, and Social Aspects" in Potsdam, Germany, invites applications for short-term fellowships available in 2019, 2020. We are offering several three- to twelve-month fellowships to external PhD candidates who would like to do their research within one dedicated project of the CRC.

Language users exhibit a high degree of variability at all levels of the linguistic system, language use, and language development and change. By exploring the systematicity and the limits of variability in linguistic behaviours, the main focus of the CRC is on identifying the constraints of the underlying linguistic system. Several projects jointly evaluate the limits, relations, dependencies, and commonalities of different types of variability across a range of linguistic phenomena from the perspectives of (A) language interaction and change, of (B) language processing, and of (C) grammatical systems.

We are looking for a highly motivated PhD student to work in the project “Sequent and tableau-based systems for non-classical logics”. The duration of the project is 33 months . A monthly stipend of 2500 PLN is attached to the position. Research in the project will be conducted under the supervision of prof. Andrzej Indrzejczak in the Department of Logic and Methodology of Science at the University of Łódź, Poland.

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna is inviting applications for the position of a PhD candidate (100%) within the project 'The Roots of Mathematical Structuralism'. This is a 5-year Starting Grant-project (2017-2022) funded by the European Research Council and led by Principal Investigator Georg Schiemer, Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy.

The project investigates the mathematical and philosophical roots of mathematical structuralism. The focus is set on two historical developments in nineteenth century mathematics and early twentieth century philosophy of science, and the principal objective of the project is to provide the first comparative investigation of these early contributions to structuralism and their immediate mathematical background. The second aim of the project is to connect these contributions with more recent debates on mathematical structuralism.

The position comes without teaching obligations and no German language competency is required.

A PhD student position is being offered currently at Siemens Mobility in France, in the domain of programming languages and formal proofs. A so called "CIFRE" thesis, it is carried out in industry, and validated by an academic partner, in this case LIX, Ecole Polytechnique.

The topic is optimisation of code with formal correctness guarantees. It will be supervised by Lutz Strassburger (at Ecole Polytechnique) and Danko Ilik (at Siemens Mobility).

Two post-doctoral research fellow positions in the area of SAT/CP/AI are available at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore. The research will be primarily in the broad areas of SAT and CP with relevance to Artificial Intelligence. Some areas of focus include sampling and discrete integration techniques, optimization techniques, modelling, and machine learning for CP/SAT. The positions will be for 1 year from 2018/19 but a longer period may be possible.

We invite applications for 3-year PhD position in Philosophy of science/Science and Technology Studies at Université Grenoble Alpes, France. The successful candidate is expected to explore various dimensions and challenges of the articulation between basic science, applied science and technological innovation. The PhD candidate will have the unique opportunity to develop his/her research in situ, that is, to work within the pluridisciplinary consortium QuEnG (Quantum Engineering Grenoble) gathering theoretical physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, engineers as well as philosophers of science, philosophers of physics and sociologists of science.

Starting date : January 1, 2019.

The Theory and Foundations group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, UK, is inviting applications for fully funded PhD positions in theoretical computer science. The group works on various aspects of theoretical computer science, and is one of the leading theory groups in Europe, with regular publications in top international conferences and journals in theoretical computer science.

The applicants are expected to have a strong background in discrete mathematics, algorithms, or related topics with undergraduate and/or Master's degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, or related disciplines. The position will be fully funded, and the successful applicant(s) will be receiving a stipend at rate in line with current Research Councils UK rates.

The University of Helsinki Doctoral Programme in Mathematics and Statistics, (Domast), invites applications for doctoral candidate positions for a 1-4 year period starting from 1 January 2019. The duration of the employment contract depends on the phase of the appointee?s thesis. The duties of a doctoral candidate are to work on their doctoral thesis and to complete the doctoral studies determined by the curriculum. The duties may also include teaching and other tasks for up to 5% of the annual working time.

We are looking for a PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence and Logic at Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT), Toulouse, France, with starting date on 1st January 2019.

The PhD candidate will work in the context of the recently funded ANR project CoPains 'Cognitive Planning in Persuasive Multimodal Communication'. The goal of the CoPains project is to build artificial agents that are capable of inducing human users to adopt healthy behaviors and, if necessary, by persuading them to change their habits in their interest. CoPains is expected to exploit theoretical and empirical approaches by combining, in a rather innovative way, corpus-based analysis with formal methods from different areas of artificial intelligence (AI). This includes logic, planning, sentiment analysis, and data-mining.

We are looking for a PhD candidate in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) in Toulouse, France, with earliest starting date on 1st December 2018. The deadline for applications is 5 November 2018.

Research at the Faculty of Humanities is carried out by six research schools under the aegis of the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research. The Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication (ACLC), one of the six research schools, currently has a vacant PhD position in cooperation with the Institute for Logic, Language and Communication. We invite applications from excellent candidates who wish to conduct research on irony in a political context and its logical and linguistic properties.

We are looking for a PhD candidate in Computational Social Choice at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) in Toulouse, France, with earliest starting date on 1st November 2018. The PhD candidate will work under the supervision of Umberto Grandi, Laurent Perrussel and Emiliano Lorini, as part of the recently funded ANR project on “Social Choice and Social Networks”. The aim of this research project is the conception of algorithms for opinion diffusion and vote computation in the presence of a social network, and its assessment in terms of computational and communicational complexity, axiomatic properties, including game-theoretic ones such as resistance to strategic actions by voters or external agents.

We are searching for one four-year PhD position on the topics of concurrency, logic, type systems, and programming languages.

You will contribute to rigorously comparing different type systems for message-passing programs, such as session types. These comparisons will use as reference a correspondence known as "propositions as sessions", which connects concurrency and logic in the style of the well-known Curry-Howard correspondence. We will use the resulting comparisons to streamline existing type systems, and to guide the development of verification tools for message-passing programs.

Your PhD research will be embedded in the project "Unifying Correctness for Communicating Software", a VIDI career grant recently awarded to Dr. Jorge A. Pérez by the NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research).

We have two open PhD student positions in the program verification group. These positions involve performing research on program verification under the supervision of Prof. dr. Bart Jacobs and postdoctoral researcher Amin Timany, with the goal of obtaining a PhD within four to five years.

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the area of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at the School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, in the project "Belief Change in Knowledge-Based Agents". The successful applicant(s) will collaborate with Prof. James Delgrande and other members of the Computational Logic Lab. Review of applications begins immediately until the position is filled.

The Chair of Computational Logic at TU Dresden offers several full positions (E13/E14) as Research Associate (PhD/PostDoc position) to be filled between October 2018 and October 2019. The positions are for up to 5 years and offer the possibility of further academic qualification (PhD/habilitation thesis).

Tasks incluse scientific research on decidability of logical formalisms in the course of the project “A Grand Unified Theory of Decidability in Logic-Based Knowledge Representation” (DeciGUT).