The Ruhr-Universität Bochum is one of the leading research universities. The university draws its strengths from both the diversity and the proximity of scientific and engineering disciplines on a single, coherent campus. This highly dynamic setting enables students and researchers to work across traditional boundaries of academic subjects and faculties. One particular strength of RUB is interdisciplinary research in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, see https://ml-ai.rub.de/. The Institute for Neural Computation is a central research institute, see https://www.ini.rub.de/. It focuses on the dynamics and learning of perception and behavior on a functional level but is otherwise very diverse, ranging from neurophysiology and psychophysics over computational neuroscience to machine learning and technical applications. There is an open position for a research assistant / Phd-student in the group „Theory of Neural Systems“ of Prof. Dr. Laurenz Wiskott to be filled at 15th of Septembert. The appointment will be for three years. Salary is 75% of salary scale TV-L E13. Task: • Develop a generative model for learning high-level representations of images that ideally should include visual invariances, should enable attention driven selection, and support classification of objects. A promising basis for the development is the vector quantizes variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE). The system will be developed with methods from machine learning but should integrate well into a system-level model of episodic memory. • Present results on conferences and publish them in journals of machine learning or computational neuroscience. • Teaching assistance for 3 semester hours per week. • Constructive contributions to the research group. We offer: • An interesting interdisciplinary environment in the field of Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence / Computational Neuroscience. • Room to develop your own ideas in the project. • Infrastructure to integrate well into the institute and the group. • Opportunity to do a PhD (Dr). Applications (CV, transcript of records for MSc and BSc, statement of purpose) should be sent as a single pdf file to laurenz.wiskott@rub.de. Travel expenses for interviews will not be refunded. Ruhr-University Bochum is committed to equal opportunity in employment and gender equality in its working environment. We therefore look forward to applications from qualified women. Applications from appropriately qualified handicapped persons are also encouraged. Requirements: • Very good Master in mathematics, computer science, engineering, or a related field. • Good programming and mathematical skills. • Interest in interdisciplinary research questions and cooperations. Advantageous: • Experience in Machine Learning and/or Computational Neuroscience. • Good communication and teamwork skills. • Experience in interdisciplinary projects. • Programming skills in Python.