1 x Postdoctoral Researcher or Ph.D. Position in AutoML and/or Recommender Systems

Our group — the Intelligent Systems Group at the University of Siegen in Germany — seeks to fill 1 open position for either a postdoctoral researcher or a Ph.D. student. The starting date is flexible but we would prefer it as soon as possible.

Your field of research would be flexible (there is no set topic) as long as it relates to Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), Neural Architecture Search (NAS), and/or Algorithm Selection in Recommender Systems (RecSys). We have many different ideas — and are happy to discuss your own ideas. The contract will be issued for at least 3 years.

Postdoctoral Position

For the postdoctoral position, we seek a person that has/possesses:

• Must
  • A Ph.D. in computer science or a related discipline
  • A strong will to pursue an academic career and either become a professor or a permanent research fellow (in German: “Akademischer Rat”)
  • Excellent knowledge in one of the core research areas (recommender systems, automated machine learning, or related)
  • Excellent publication track record with at least 1 first-author publication at a major machine learning conference (e.g. NeurIPS, ICML, ECML/PKDD, IJCAI…), recommender systems conference (e.g. ACM RecSys), or information retrieval conference (e.g. SIGIR), or in a corresponding journal (A/A*-ranked).
  • Excellent English language skills
• Optional
  • Evidence of successful supervision of Bachelor’s or Master’s students.
  • Evidence of self-motivated and independent work. We would like to see that you did something beyond the things that your Ph.D. supervisor told you to do.
  • Teaching experience
  • Acquired funding
  • Experience with Deep Learning and GPUs
  • German language skills (not a must)

PhD Position

For the Ph.D. position, we seek a person that has/possesses:

• Must
  • A Master’s degree in computer science or a related discipline
  • Knowledge in machine learning or recommender systems
  • Evidence of independent self-motivated work
  • Good English language skills
• Optional
  • First experience with AutoML, NAS or related fields
  • Experience with Deep Learning and GPUs
  • German language skills (not a must)

We Offer

We offer an excellent environment to support your career and personal advancement. We will support you with funding, time, advice, and resources to achieve your goals. In particular, you will enjoy

• A large degree of freedom when it comes to your research and teaching
• A competitive salary. Both postdocs and PhD students will be hired on the TVL 13 scale, for excellent postdocs a promotion to TVL 14 is negotiable. This means, your gross income will be somewhere between 50,000€ and 77,000€ pa. This leads to a net salary of approximately between 2,300€ and 3,300€ per month (more if you are married or have children). Health insurance, paid sick leave, paid vacation, paid parental leave, and pension contributions are included.
• An excellent research environment. We have plenty of funding for travel, equipment, paid student workers, and whatever else you may need. And, of course, every member of the group receives access to our University’s GPU cluster (10 nodes each with 1-4 Tesla V100) as well as our own small mini-GPU-workstation (RTX 3090). As a postdoc, you won’t have your own budget officially, but you will have budget responsibility as such that you will support Prof. Beel in planning and deciding on how to spend a €1.25m research grant that the ISG Group recently received.
• Support through our secretary and technical staff.
• An international network: Joeran Beel, head of the Intelligent Systems Group, has a large international network due to, among others, his positions as Visiting Professor in Tokyo and Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. You would be welcome to visit these (or other) institutes for research cooperations, of course, fully funded.
• Generous office space with awesome views from the 8th floor; 1 or 2 persons per office; large kitchen; well-equipped meeting room.
• A great environment for living with a nice city with everything you need (cinemas, theatres, shopping malls, parks, restaurants, clubs, a castle …) or your children may need (affordable child care, free schools, and free health care); Beautiful mountains and forests, perfect for hiking and mountain biking. Ski areas are just an hour’s drive away; affordable rent; short distance (1 hour) to major cities like Cologne or Dusseldorf.
• Dual Career support

Apply

You need to apply via the official university website. Feel free to contact us for an informal chat. Let us know the following details.

1. Your current employer/university: 
2. Current place of residence:
3. a) Earliest b) Prefered c) Latest possible start date:
4. Your experience in Machine Learning:
5. Your experience in Recommender Systems and Information Retrieval:
6. Your experience in AutoML, algorithm selection, optimization, meta-learning, and NAS:
7. Your Work/Industry Experience: 
8. Notable contributions to software projects e.g. on GitHub:
9. Noteworthy awards:
10. Your Motivation / Why you want to join our group:
11. Your favorite alcoholic beverage, if there is one :-):
    
    PostDoc Applications Only:
12. Your Google Scholar profile:
13. Your Top-3 publications in the past 3 years (URLs to full text):
14. Your two most successful student supervisions (Bachelor/Master or Ph.D. students):
15. Acquired Funding:
16. Teaching Experience:
17. Your research vision or project proposal (3-5 paragraphs):