IDSIA


One PhD Student Position Available


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.

Marcus Hutter


We are offering a fellowship for a PhD student (or one PostDoc) with excellent mathematical skills interested in the foundations of Artificial Intelligence; more particularly in One particular goal is to explore a promising novel theory that marries sequential decision theory with algorithmic information theory.

Possible backgrounds are computer science, physics, mathematics, etc. The initial appointment will be for 2 years, starting in April 2005, or possibly later. Normally there will be a prolongation. The goal is to finish the PhD thesis within 3-4 years. The new PhD student will interact with Marcus Hutter and Juergen Schmidhuber and other people at IDSIA. The salary is roughly SFr 35'000 per year, low taxes. No teaching is required, etc. - just research for PhD degree. 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.

To get an idea of our research interests in the above areas and the required skills, please have a look at the following publications:
Please check out www.hutter1.net/ai for more information, and/or www.hutter1.net/ai/introref.htm for book and survey article recommendations.

Applicants should submit:

  (i) Detailed curriculum vitae (including grades),
 (ii) List of three references (including their email addresses),
(iii) Statement on how their research interests fit the above topics (1-2 pages).
(iv) Links to their master's thesis or publications.

Please send all documents by end of January 2005 to:

Marcus Hutter, IDSIA, Galleria 2, 6928 Manno (Lugano), Switzerland.

Applications can also be submitted by email to marcus @ idsia.ch (1MB max!).
WWW pointers to ps/pdf/doc/html files are welcome.
Use Firstname.Lastname.DocDescription.DocType for filename convention.

Thanks for your interest

Marcus Hutter, Senior researcher, IDSIA



ABOUT IDSIA. Our research focuses on 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. 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). In the "X-Lab Survey" by Business Week magazine, IDSIA was ranked in fourth place in the category "COMPUTER SCIENCE - BIOLOGICALLY INSPIRED" - after the Santa Fe Institute, Stanford University, and EPFL (also in Switzerland). Its comparatively tiny size notwithstanding, IDSIA also ranked among the top ten labs worldwide in the broader category "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE".

IDSIA is located near the beautiful city of Lugano in Ticino (pictures), the scenic southernmost province of Switzerland, origin of special relativity and the WWW. Milano, Italy's center of fashion and finance, is 1 hour away, Venice 3 hours. Our collaborators at CSCS (the Swiss supercomputing center) are right beneath us; we are also affiliated with the University of Lugano and SUPSI. Switzerland boasts the highest citation impact factor, the highest supercomputing capacity pc (per capita), the most Nobel prizes pc (450% of the US value), and perhaps the best chocolate.


Marcus Hutter, Senior researcher, IDSIA