PhD position in Multimodal Grounding for Robotic Assistants (ANITI, Toulouse, France) The Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute (ANITI: https://aniti.univ-toulouse.fr/en/) in Toulouse (France) is looking to recruit a PhD student in Machine Learning to work on multimodal grounding (e.g., joint vision-language models). The selected candidate will develop deep learning models capable of achieving state-of-the-art performance on cognitively challenging problems such as: Visual Question Answering, Incremental Learning, Meta-Learning, Multi-Task Learning, Task-Switching, Robust Representation Learning, etc. The candidate will join an active group of like-minded students (the ANITI Graduate School) and a vibrant research community (made up of nearly 30 ANITI Research Chairs). Work will be carried out in the Chair of Rufin VanRullen (https://rufinv.github.io) at CerCo (https://cerco.cnrs.fr), but in close collaboration with local and international research groups (IRIT, LAAS, Linagora, University of Potsdam, Airbus AI research). Rufin VanRullen’s ANITI Chair is entitled “Deep Learning with Semantic, Cognitive and Biological Constraints”, and aims at fostering next-generation AI architectures by drawing inspiration from Cognitive Sciences and Neuroscience. The PhD project is part of a large-scale France-Germany collaborative grant entitled “Natural Language Programming for Conversational Cobots”. The multi-modal grounding research will need to assist the overall grant objectives (ultimately, helping robotic assistants interact with humans in natural language), but there will also be freedom to pursue independent research questions related to multimodal grounding in AI and/or in the brain. The ideal candidate will have a Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning or related fields, and substantial experience with at least one deep learning framework (PyTorch, Tensorflow, Keras…). Research experience in Computer Vision, NLP and/or Reinforcement Learning is highly desirable. The salary scale is according to ANITI standards. The position is open to start immediately, but applications will be considered until the position is filled. To apply, send a CV and a short (less than 1-page) statement about research interests to rufin.vanrullen@cnrs.fr. Informal inquiries can also be made to the same address. -- ---------------------------------------------------- Rufin VanRullen, PhD. < ANITI - AI Research Chair > Artificial & Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute CNRS-Centre de Recherche Cerveau & Cognition (CerCo) Faculte de Medecine Purpan - 31052 Toulouse (France) email: rufin.vanrullen@cnrs.fr Web: https://rufinv.github.io/ Tel: +33 669 547 468 ----------------------------------------------------