Research Programmer and Postdoctoral Positions

Human-Level Intelligence Laboratory

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The Human-Level Intelligence Laboratory at Rensselaer has just been awarded a MURI grant on "Unified Theories of Language and Cognition". As a consequence, we have funding for several graduate student, postdoctoral and research programmer positions.

The project aims to develop a unified computational theory of language use that significantly expands the ability of computers to understand language and explains how people use background knowledge and context to achieve deep understanding of language even when it is highly ambiguous, novel, ungrammatical and/or metaphorical. Many aspects of this problem (for example, the reasoning algorithms and ontologies involved) are not specific to language and thus an interest in language is not strictly necessary to participate.

Rensselaer is located in the Hudson Valley, equidistant from Boston and New York City. It is conceivable that we could work something out with someone who is constrained to reside near one of those cities.

Our primary criterion for bringing new people into the lab is the intelligence, curiosity, energy and motivation needed to solve the problems involved in this project. Background in one or more of the following areas, would help, though is not necessary:

* Linguistics. Formal syntax and semantics, construction grammars and pragmatics are especially relevant.

* Reasoning algorithms. Our work integrates multiple forms of reasoning algorithms, including those based on first-order logic, SAT, probability theory and analogy.

* Ontologies. Our approach is knowledge-intensive and will require the ability to acquire and organize this knowledge.

* Semantic Web. We will be interfacing with information available in many machine-readable, distributed knowledge bases. There are many interesting problems involved in using this information for reasoning and language understanding.

* Software engineering. All our work is integrated within a single cognitive architecture. This presents several interesting software engineering challenges.

If you are interested in a position, please send a note to me at cassin at rpi dot edu.