The Informatics Institute (IvI) of the Faculty of Science is recruiting a Postdoctoral researcher Conversational Search.

The postdoctoral position will be within the Information and Language Processing Systems (ILPS) group at the Informatics Institute. ILPS is led by Prof. Maarten de Rijke and also includes Prof. Evangelos Kanoulas, Dr Maarten Marx, and Dr Christof Monz as well as around 30 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. Other groups doing related artificial intelligence research within IvI are AMLAB (led by Prof Max Welling), the Intelligent Sensory Information Systems (ISIS) group (led by Prof. Cees Snoek), and the Computer Vision (CV) group led by Prof. Theo Gevers.

Conversational information seeking is concerned with a task-oriented sequence of exchanges between one or more users and an information system. Development of conversational information seeking systems requires new research on a broad range of topics related to information elicitation, user modeling, precision-oriented search, exploratory search, generated information objects, description of retrieval results, session-based search, dialog systems capable of sustained multi-turn conversations, and evaluation. The postdoc that we are seeking will strengthen and complement existing research on conversational search within ILPS (on task-oriented search, diversity, machine learning for conversational search).

• PhD in Computer Science, emphasizing information retrieval, language technology, deep learning;
• strong publication record in top-tier international conferences and journals;
• solid knowledge of programming and (deep) learning toolkits;
• motivated and capable of working with PhD students.

The appointment of the postdoctoral research fellow will be full-time (38 hours a week) for two years.
The gross monthly salary will be in accordance with the University regulations for academic personnel, and will range from €2.588 up to a maximum of €4.757 (scale 10/11) based on a full-time appointment depending on qualifications, expertise and on the number of years of professional experience. The Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities is applicable.

There are also secondary benefits, such as 8% holiday allowance per year and the end of year allowance of 8.3%.

Among other things, we offer:

• competitive pay and good benefits;
• top-50 University worldwide;
• extremely friendly, interactive and international working environment;
• direct access to high-end computing facilities;
• new building located near the city center (10 minutes by bicycle) of one of Europe’s most beautiful and lively cities.

English is the working language within the Informatics Institute. Moreover, since Amsterdam is a very international city where almost everybody speaks and understands English, you need not be afraid of the language barrier.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.

http://www.uva.nl/en/home

Informatics Institute

The Faculty of Science holds a leading position internationally in its fields of research and participates in a large number of cooperative programs with universities, research institutes and businesses. The faculty has a student body of around 6,000 and 1,500 members of staff, spread over eight research institutes and a number of faculty-wide support services. A considerable part of the research is made possible by external funding from Dutch and international organizations and the private sector. The Faculty of Science offers thirteen Bachelor's degree programs and eighteen Master’s degree programs in the fields of the exact sciences, computer science and information studies, and life and earth sciences.

Since September 2010, the whole faculty has been housed in a brand new building at the Science Park in Amsterdam. The instalment of the faculty has made the Science Park one of the largest centres of academic research in the Netherlands.

The Informatics Institute is one of the large research institutes with the faculty, with a focus on complex information systems divided in four broad themes: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Science, Data Science en Systems and Network Engineering. We have a prominent international standing and are active in a dynamic scientific area, with a strong innovative character and an extensive portfolio of externally funded projects.

http://ivi.uva.nl/