JOB: graduate student, postdoctoral and research programmer positions

[nickcas...@gmail.com]

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.

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