The research of the Computational Intelligence Group (
https://cs.vu.nl/ci/) addresses fundamental issues about how to design, use and understand autonomous machines that can evolve, learn and self-organise. We are interested in embodied intelligence that is not hosted in an abstract digital entity, but has a 'body' and agency that make it capable of acting in the world, generating its own experiences and learning from these experiences. To boost our
research in learning machines we are looking for an assistant professor with the right background regarding learning algorithms.
The overarching goal is to develop novel algorithms and models that solve learning problems efficiently and to validate these in a range of scenarios, involving physical or simulated robots. In this regard, we are particularly interested in soft robots and robotic swarms. Possible approaches include reinforcement learning, evolutionary methods, surrogate models, statistical or symbolic priors, multidimensional quality-diversity archives, and distributed or social learning approaches.
Our facilities (used for research as well teaching) include a Bio-Inspired Robotics Lab with different hardware platforms, such as e-puck, Thymio II, Robobo, Crazyflie 2.0 and our custom-made evolvable robots. Furthermore, we have a cluster of powerful Linux workstations designated to simulation experiments
Your dutiesThe position includes research, education and management (40%:40%:20%) and contains among others the following responsibilities:
- pioneering research into learning algorithms employed in robots, virtual agents, or smart devices
- acquisition of research funding, personal grants or projects with a consortium
- supervising PhD students
- teaching courses in the AI program, supervising AI Bachelor and Master student projects
- outreach, including collaboration with other groups and publicity for the general public
- being a valuable 'departmental citizen' and contributing to management tasks