The position is now filled!

Our budget is limited, and so we sadly were not able to consider several great candidates with impressive CVs. If you were among them then I do hope you are not too disappointed now, and I would like to thank you once more for your efforts, and I wish you all the best for your future carreer. Please check out http://www.idsia.ch/jobs.html for new job openings.

Marco Zaffalon

We are looking for an outstanding Ph.D. student with excellent mathematical as well as computer programming (e.g., C, C++, Java) skills.

We intend to explore the opportunities offered by imprecise probabilities and graphical models to data mining, in particular to classification. Classification has a long tradition in Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. Classifiers are tools inferred from data that learn how to do real and important tasks of diagnosis, prediction and recognition. Imprecise probability-based classification is an exciting new area, with great potential to provide new and reliable ways to deal with difficult problems. The research will need to address both theoretical (foundations of statistical reasoning) and applied issues (implementation and test of new models). To get a better idea of the research topic, please have a look at the following publications:

• Zaffalon, M. (2002). The naive credal classifier. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference 105(1), 5--21.
• Zaffalon, M. (2002). Exact credal treatment of missing data. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference 105(1), 105--122.
• Zaffalon, M. (2001). Statistical inference of the naive credal classifier. In: de Cooman, G., Fine, T., Seidenfeld, T. (Eds), ISIPTA '01: Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Imprecise Probabilities and Their Application. Shaker Publishing, The Netherlands, pp. 384--393.
• Zaffalon, M., Wesnes, K., Petrini, O. (2001). Credal classification for dementia screening. In: Quaglini, S., Barahona P., Andreassen, S. (Eds.), AIME '01: Proceedings of the Eighth European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, pp. 67--76.
• Fagiuoli, E., Zaffalon, M. (2000). Tree-augmented naive credal classifiers. In: IPMU 2000: Proceedings of the 8th Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems Conference. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, pp. 1320--1327.
• Fagiuoli, E., Zaffalon, M. (1998). 2U: an exact interval propagation algorithm for polytrees with binary variables. Artificial Intelligence 106(1), 77--107.

Possible backgrounds are computer science, physics, mathematics, engineering, etc. The position is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The initial appointment will be for 2 years, starting in January 2003, or possibly later. Normally there will be a prolongation. The goal is to finish the Ph.D. thesis within 3-4 years. The new Ph.D. student will interact with Marco Zaffalon and other people at IDSIA, and will be involved in international research collaborations. The salary is roughly 35,000 CHF (Swiss Francs) per year, low taxes. No teaching is required, just research. There is travel funding in case of papers accepted at important conferences. The official language at IDSIA is English. The position is suitable for students no older than 35 years.

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APPLICATION DEADLINE
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DECEMBER 1st 2002

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CONTACT INFORMATION
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Applicants should submit:
(i) Detailed curriculum vitae
(ii) List of three references (and their email addresses)
(iii) Transcripts of undergraduate and graduate (if applicable) studies
(iv) Concise statement of their research interests (two pages max).

Please address all correspondence to:

Marco Zaffalon, IDSIA, Galleria 2, CH-6928 Manno (Lugano), Switzerland.

Applications can also be submitted by email to zaffalon@idsia.ch (2MB max). WWW pointers to ps/pdf/doc/html files are welcome. Use Firstname.Lastname.DocDescription.DocType for filename convention.

Thanks for your interest.

Marco Zaffalon, Senior researcher, IDSIA.

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SHORT DESCRIPTION OF IDSIA
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IDSIA is a joint research institute of the University of Lugano and the Swiss Italian University for Applied Science. Our research focuses on uncertain reasoning, imprecise probabilities, graphical models, data mining, artificial neural nets, reinforcement learning, complexity and generalization issues, unsupervised learning and information theory, forecasting, artificial ants, combinatorial optimization, evolutionary computation. IDSIA is small but visible, competitive, and influential. The "X-Lab Survey" by Business Week Magazine ranked IDSIA among the world's top ten labs in Artificial Intelligence. IDSIA's algorithms hold the world records for several important operations research benchmarks (see Nature 406(6791):39-42 for an overview of artificial ant algorithms developed at IDSIA).

IDSIA develops and participates in projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, by the European Commission and by the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation. IDSIA also consults private firms and enterprises.
IDSIA (see our building) is located near the Swiss supercomputing center. IDSIA is close to the beautiful city of Lugano in Ticino, the scenic southernmost province of Switzerland. Zurich, Milan and Venice are only few hours by train from Lugano.