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2010 - Recently three of J. Schmidhuber's postdocs at IDSIA got professorships abroad: J. Unkelbach at Harvard, J. Togelius at IT Univ. Copenhagen, J. Conradt at TU Munich. Now JS is looking for THREE FRESH POSTDOCS to replace them. JS also encourages applications for IDSIA PhD fellowships. (BTW, there are additional PhD jobs financed by USI which also may indirectly lead to supervision by JS.)
Juergen Schmidhuber at IDSIA
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We are seeking outstanding researchers with experience / interest in topics such as recurrent networks (RNN), reinforcement learning (RL), evolution, unsupervised learning & deep networks, theoretically optimal Universal AI and RL, Universal Problem Solvers, adaptive robotics, in particular, self-modeling robots, artificial curiosity & creativity / theory of novelty & surprise. Goal: to improve the state of the art in machine learning & robotics. Salary: Postdoc ~ SFR 72,000 / year (~ US$ 69,700 / year as of 7 Jan 2010); PhD student ~ SFR 38,000 / year (~ US$ 36,700). Low taxes. PhD students should have a master degree, preferably in computer science or related fields including math and physics. Start: 2010-2011 (flexible).
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Einstein

IDSIA is located just outside the beautiful city of Lugano in Ticino (pics), the scenic southern Swiss province.

Milano, Italy's center of fashion and finance, is 1 hour away, Venice 3 hours.


English is the official language at IDSIA and its affiliated university USI and at USI's Faculty of Informatics.

Check out some previous IDSIA postdocs who went on to become profs
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Submit your CV, a list of 3 references and their email addresses, and a statement of relevant research interests, to cinzia@idsia.ch and juergen@idsia.ch. In the subject header, mention name and job type and keyword sn2010. For example, if your name is Jo Mo and you want a postdoc job, use subject: Jo Mo postdoc sn2010
IDSIA Machine Learning Jobs 2010

Update of August 2010. We have filled most of the positions, but since there are a few new projects in the pipeline (nothing definitive yet though), we are continually evaluating old and new applicants, hoping to find just a few more additional researchers who have exactly the profile necessary to complement the already existing expertise.

Interviews. Most interviews take place at IDSIA, but sometimes also arrange Skype video interviews. We already conducted several interviews at the Singularity Summit in NYC (3-4 Oct 2009) and at the EUCogII meeting in Hamburg (10-11 Oct 2009), at CogSys 2010, EUCogII 2010, AGI 2010 (Lugano, March 5-8), GP Theory & Practice 2010 (Ann Arbor, Michigan, May 20-22).

Other recent jobs (filled) in the lab of JS at IDSIA: 5 postdoc and 5 PhD positions in various related projects; 1 Postdoc in biologically plausible reinforcement learning.

Matterhorn

IDSIA was the smallest of the world's top ten AI labs listed in the 1997 "X-Lab Survey" by Business Week magazine, and ranked in fourth place in the category "Computer Science - Biologically Inspired". IDSIA's most important work was done after 1997 though.
IDSIA is affiliated with the University of Lugano (USI) and USI's Faculty of Informatics and SUPSI. It has strong ties to the TU Munich lab of cognitive robotics at TUM Computer Science.

IDSIA is small but visible, competitive, and influential. For example, its Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms broke numerous benchmark records and are now widely used in industry for routing, logistics etc. (today entire conferences specialize on Artificial Ants). IDSIA is also the origin of the first mathematical theory of optimal Universal Artificial Intelligence and self-referential Universal Problem Solvers (previous work on general AI was dominated by heuristics). IDSIA's artificial Recurrent Neural Networks learn to solve numerous previous unlearnable sequence processing tasks through gradient descent, Artificial Evolution, Reinforcement Learning, and other methods. Research topics also include complexity and generalization issues, unsupervised learning and information theory, forecasting, learning robots. IDSIA's results were reviewed not only in science journals such as Nature, Science, Scientific American, but also in numerous popular press articles in TIME magazine, the New York Times, der SPIEGEL, and many others. Numerous TV shows on Tech & Science helped to popularize IDSIA's achievements.

Switzerland is a good place for scientists. It is the origin of special relativity (1905) and the World Wide Web (1990), is associated with 105 Nobel laureates, and boasts far more Nobel prizes per capita than any other nation. It also has the world's highest number of publications per capita, the highest number of patents per capita, the highest citation impact factor, the most cited single-author paper, the biggest and most expensive machine ever, etc. As of 2009/2010, Switzerland is again the most competitive country, according to the World Economic Forum. It also got the highest ranking in the list of happiest countries (1990s average), according to the Happiness Foundation.