One postdoc and one PhD position are available in the lab of Constantin Rothkopf at the Centre for Cognitive Science @ TU Darmstadt as part of the ERC project ACTOR. The goal of this project is to use both human behavioral experiments and computational modeling to understand human sequential behavior in tasks ranging from continuous psychophysics to navigation and food preparation in the framework of sequential decision making/planning/optimal control/RL. To get a better idea, here some work from our group related to this project: - F. Kessler, J. Frankenstein, C. A Rothkopf. A dynamic Bayesian actor model explains endpoint variability in homing tasks, bioRxiv, 2022. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.09.515854v1 - Straub, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2022). Putting perception into action with inverse optimal control for continuous psychophysics, eLife 11, e76635. https://elifesciences.org/articles/76635  - Schultheis, M., Straub, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2021). Inverse optimal control adapted to the noise characteristics of the human sensorimotor system. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 34, 9429-9442. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/4e55139e019a58e0084f194f758ff...  - Neupärtl, N., Tatai, F., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2020). Intuitive physical reasoning about objects’ masses transfers to a visuomotor decision task consistent with Newtonian physics. PLoS computational biology, 16(10), e1007730. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007730 - Hoppe, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2019). Multi-step planning of eye movements in visual search. Scientific reports, 9(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-37536-0 - Hoppe, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2016). Learning rational temporal eye movement strategies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(29), 8332-8337. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1601305113 Our group is part of the Centre for Cognitive Science and the AI Center at TU Darmstadt, which are home to a an internationally outstanding group of PIs and junior researchers working in the areas of computational cognitive science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. We are part of several research consortia and engage in several fruitful research collaborations. The lab has state of the art equipment for eye and body tracking, VR, naturalistic task monitoring, psychophysics and access to one of the most generous computing infrastructures in Germany. The Frankfurt-Darmstadt metropolitan area is located in the heart of Europe and is one of the most international regions in Germany with a diverse community and rich culture repeatedly earning high rankings in worldwide surveys of quality of living. Frankfurt just recently reached 7th place worldwide in a ranking by the Economist and Darmstadt has repeatedly ranked among the top innovation driving cities in Germany. While some of the positions within this ERC are geared towards more behavioral work others are strongly focused on computational modeling. Applicants may therefore have a background in computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, engineering, or related fields. Don’t hesitate to contact me for more details. Please send the official application to the dean of the of the department of human sciences  dekanat@humanw.tu-darmstadt.de including a CV, a two page summary of your past research experience and current research interests, and contact information for 2-3 references in a single pdf file.  The code for the PhD position is “721” and the code for the Postdoc position is “722”. Official advertisements are linked at the end of this post. The positions can be filled starting in December. Applications will be reviewed on a continuing basis. All the best, Constantin Rothkopf https://www.pip.tu-darmstadt.de/ http://www.cogsci.tu-darmstadt.de/ https://hessian.ai/ Official ads: https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/universitaet/karriere_an_der_tu/stellenangebote/... https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/universitaet/karriere_an_der_tu/stellenangebote/...