Do you have the ambition to lead a diverse research group? Are you able to inspire the Machine Learning

Group (AMLAB), representing the group and maintaining and further building on the international academic visibility of the Machine Learning group? Do you have a talent for, and a clear vision on university teaching and research? Come work with us and help extend a collaborative academic environment in which teaching, research, and innovation go hand-in-hand. As our colleague, you can also contribute to our vibrant undergraduate and graduate programs in artificial intelligence.

We are seeking a candidate to chair our Machine Learning group either at Full professor or Associate professor level (depending on qualifications). You are expected to make significant contributions in world-class research and top-quality academic teaching, as well as effective contributions to management and organization of the research group and the Informatics Institute.

What are you going to do?

We expect you to consolidate the leading research position AMLAB currently enjoys worldwide, to consolidate the current strengths of the group, such as deep learning and causality and to lead the group to new promising research directions such as (deep) reinforcement learning, privacy preserving Machine Learning or Machine Learning designed for hardware.

We expect you to sustain the group by acquiring funding from national, international, and industrial sources and actively contribute to exploitation of scientific research, thus contributing to the valorization duty of the University. Involvement with a startup to commercialize research results is encouraged.

We also expect you to collaborate with the other research groups within our institute and to reach out to other academic disciplines at the Faculty of Science, UvA and beyond. Current collaborations include biology, astronomy (ASTRON) and chemistry and medical imaging (collaborations with AMC, Radboud UMC, Utrecht MC). But we expect a very wide range of possible collaborations beyond these topics including finance, social sciences and humanities, and so on.

AMLAB is part of the new European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent systems (ELLIS) Unit in Amsterdam. As such you will enjoy the possibility to host and exchange students, postdocs and faculty from all over Europe and Israel as well as recruit students through the central ELLIS application program.

• A PhD in Computer Science or a related discipline;
• proven ability to engage in cutting-edge research in machine learning;
• demonstrated to be creative and inspiring with excellent managerial qualities and leadership capabilities;
• documented excellence in research through publications in top international conferences and journals;
• the capability to initiate and organize new research by identifying innovative research themes;
• a strong track record in the acquisition of funded research;
• contacts necessary to initiate national and international partnerships, and being part of an international network;
• experience in valorization of research;
• proven teaching skills (preferably with a certificate of academic teaching quality), excellent didactic qualities and affinity with the content of the Bachelors and Master programs in Artificial Intelligence;
• commitment to stimulating and supervising PhD research;
• willingness and ability to perform administrative, organizational and managerial tasks.

We offer a challenging job at a dynamic and ambitious university and an attractive package of fringe benefits, for instance: generous leave arrangements, application for attractive fiscal arrangements are possible for employees from abroad, attractive retirement benefits, collective health insurance and excellent parental leave packages. The position will be filled at the level of Associate or Full professor, depending on qualifications.
We expect to grow AMLAB within the context of the ELLIS unit by two more junior faculty. As such, we are open to the possibility of appointing multiple faculty positions simultaneously as part of a start-up package for this position.
The gross monthly salary of the Full professor will be in accordance with the University regulations for academic personnel and will be €5,582 to €8,127 (scale H2) gross per month. We offer a permanent tenured appointment.
The gross monthly salary of the Associate professor position (UHD1) will be in accordance with the University regulations for academic personnel and will be €5,294 to €6,738 (scale 14) gross per month. We offer a temporary employment contract with career plan depending on experience and qualifications. If the performance is positively assessed, the employment contract is converted into a permanent tenured appointment.
At any appointment level, the salary is based on a full-time appointment and depending on qualifications, expertise and on the number of years of professional experience. The total salary includes an additional 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% end-of-year bonus. A favorable tax agreement, the ‘30% rule’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities is applicable.

Are you curious about our extensive package of secondary employment benefits? Then find out more about working at the Faculty of Science.

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.

Faculty of Science – Informatics Institute

The Faculty of Science has a student body of around 7,000, as well as 1,600 members of staff working in education, research or support services. Researchers and students at the Faculty of Science are fascinated by every aspect of how the world works, be it elementary particles, the birth of the universe or the functioning of the brain.

The mission of the Informatics Institute is to perform curiosity-driven and use-inspired fundamental research in Computer Science. The main research themes are Artificial Intelligence, Computational Science and Systems and Network Engineering. Our research involves complex information systems at large, with a focus on collaborative, data driven, computational and intelligent systems, all with a strong interactive component.

AMLAB is a world-class research lab in machine learning, currently led by Prof. Max Welling (deep learning, probabilistic graphical models, 0.4fte) and includes junior faculty that cover the following diverse set of topics in ML: reinforcement learning (dr Herke van Hoof), causality (dr Patrick Forré), geometric deep learning (dr. Erik Bekkers), and one new junior faculty that is expected to start in 2020.

AMLAB is part of a world-class collaborative ecosystem in artificial intelligence, with leading groups in Information Retrieval (Prof. Maarten de Rijke, UvA), Computer Vision (Profs. Cees Snoek and Arnold Smeulders, UvA), 3D Vision (Prof. Theo Gevers, UvA), Knowledge Representation (Prof. Frank van Harmelen, VU), Theory of Machine Learning (Prof. Peter Grunwald, CWI) among others. New research labs in AI & Health and AI & Science are currently being formed.

AMLAB also actively participates in the Innovation Center for AI (ICAI) where industry and academia collaborate to perform fundamental and applied research in AI. A number of new industry labs have been founded over the past years, such as QUVA lab (Qualcomm-UvA) and Delta lab (Bosch-UvA), AIR lab (Ahold-Delhaize), etc. as well as a number of smaller labs (SAP, Philips, Microsoft).