Postdoctoral Position (m/f/d) | Center for Adaptive Rationality

 The Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, a scientific Institute of international orientation, seeks applicants for a Postdoctoral Position (m/f/d) on hybrid collective intelligence in open ended medical diagnostics (E 13-14 TVöD; 39 hours/week). The position is available from November 2022 onwards, but later start dates are possible. The position is for three years.

The position

The Center for Adaptive Rationality takes an interdisciplinary approach to cognitive science and decision-making. The successful candidate will work on crowd-sourcing open-ended medical diagnostics using insights and methods from cognitive science and collective and artificial intelligence and will develop, deploy and empirically evaluate online tools for harnessing hybrid collective intelligence in this domain. To this end, we will collaborate with the human crowd-sourcing platform, the Human Diagnosis Project (Human Dx). There are no teaching obligations associated with the position.

This project is embedded in the Horizon Project “HACID: Hybrid Human Artificial Collective Intelligence in Open-Ended Decision Making”. Collaborating partners include CNR Italy, NESTA UK, Met Office METO UK and Human Dx. HACID develops a novel hybrid collective intelligence for decision support to professionals facing complex open-ended problems, promoting engagement, fairness and trust. A decision support system (HACID-DSS) is proposed that is based on structured domain knowledge, semi-automatically assembled in a domain knowledge graph (DKG) from available data sources, such as scientific and gray literature. Given a specific case within the addressed domain, a pool of experts is consulted to (i) provide supporting evidence and enrich it, generating a case knowledge graph (CKG) as a refinement of the DKG, and (ii) provide one or more solutions to the problem. Exploiting the CKG, the HACID-DSS gathers the expert advice in a collective solution that aggregates the individual opinions and expands them with machine-generated suggestions. In this way, HACID harnesses the wisdom of the crowd in open-ended problems, relying on a traceable process based on supporting evidence for better explainability. A set of evaluation methods is proposed to deal with domains where ground truth is not available, demonstrating the suitability of the proposed approach in a wide range of application domains. Demonstrations are provided in two compelling case studies contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals: crowd-sourcing medical diagnostics and climate services for urban adaptation.

Your profile

Applicants should have an interest in cognitive science, data science, open science/data, and medical diagnostics. A PhD degree (or equivalent) in a field focused on cognitive psychology, cognitive science, or data-focused sciences (e.g., computational linguistics, digital humanities, human-computer interaction, or information science) is required.

Relevant prior experience include:

1. Proficiency in analysis of text data, including knowledge or experience in methodologies for text mining, machine learning, document classification, natural language processing, and network analyses.
2. Proficiency in one or more computer languages and tools used in data analysis (e.g., R, Python, C++, Unix) and web interface/information retrieval technologies, as well as collaborative software development using git.
3. Familiarity with finding and accessing natural language datasets.
4. Experience with high performance computing as applied to natural language processing and/or analysis of textual data.
5. Experience addressing challenges in using natural language datasets, including multilingual data, bias, creation, curation, metadata, disambiguation, etc.

Our offer

The successful applicant will be working in an interdisciplinary, integrative research team consisting of researchers from cognitive and information sciences. The Max Planck Institute for Human Development offers an excellent infrastructure including support staff and equipment for conducting research (incl. computer cluster).

It provides an international research environment, with English being the working language of the Center for Adaptive Rationality.

The Max Planck Society strives for gender and diversity equality. We welcome applications from all backgrounds. The Max Planck Society is committed to increasing the number of individuals with disabilities in its workforce and therefore encourages applications from such qualified individuals.

Your application

Applicants should submit a cover letter describing research interests, curriculum vitae, one single representative paper (published or working paper) and, if available, a URL pointing to a portfolio of previous computational work (e.g., github repositories). We are kindly asking you to submit your application without a photo. All documents should be sent as a single PDF file, with your last name as the file name to ARC Applications, MPI for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin (arc-applications@mpib-berlin.mpg.de), with the sentence “Postdoctoral Researcher HACID” in the email’s subject line.

Applications must be submitted by August 14th, 2022 to ensure consideration. However, review of applications will continue until the position is filled. For more information about the position please contact Stefan Herzog (herzog@mpib-berlin.mpg.de) or Ralf Kurvers (kurvers@mpib-berlin.mpg.de).

The data protection declaration for the processing of personal data within the scope of your application.