Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) Computational Intelligence

The research of the Computational Intelligence Group (https://cs.vu.nl/ci/) addresses fundamental issues about how to design, use, and understand autonomous machines that can evolve, learn, and self-organize. A crucial aspect is that of embodiment. Thus, we are interested in embodied intelligence that is not hosted in an abstract digital entity, but has a ‘body’ and agency that make it capable of acting in the world, producing its own behavior and generating its own experiences. One of our long-term motivational scenarios concerns the development of a group of robots for complex tasks in unstructured environments like rain forests or other planets. Fundamental research issues include: Can embodied artificial intelligence be evolved mimicking the evolution of natural intelligence? Can we produce powerful learning machines that adapt to changing circumstances and previously unknown situations? Can we empower collective behavior that makes a group more capable than a bunch of individuals? Working on such questions we aim to develop deeper understanding of adaptive embodied intelligence, construct appealing demonstrators and publish papers in top journals, e.g., Nature Machine Intelligence, Science Robotics.

Our facilities include a robot lab with different hardware platforms, such as e-puck, Thymio II, Robobo, and our custom-made robot system with evolvable robot bodies and brains. Furthermore, we have a cluster of powerful computers designated to simulation experiments and our own simulator called Revolve (https://github.com/ci-group/revolve). Our robots and computers are used for research as well as teaching. The teaching tasks of the CI Group include Bachelor courses, Master courses, and student project supervision with a focus on students of Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, and Business Analytics.

Your duties

The tenure track position starts at the level of assistant professor. It involves the areas of research, education and management (40%:40%:20%) and contains the following duties:

• For research you are expected to deepen and widen our evolutionary intelligence research line and cross-fertilize it with advanced learning approaches (e.g., neuro-evolution), to help advance our experiment infrastructure (software & hardware) and to write research grant proposals for obtaining external funding. Collaborations with roboticists, biologists or movement scientists is highly appreciated
• Educational tasks include teaching our existing courses, supervising Bachelor and Master student projects and the possibility to develop new courses
• Be active in outreach, seek collaboration with other groups (nationwide as well as worldwide) and contribute to publicizing the outcomes of our research
• Last but not least, you are expected to be a valuable ‘departmental citizen’ and contribute to management tasks

We especially encourage female applicants. In the case of equal suitability of candidates, preference will be given to a female candidate.