We have an open 4yr PhD position in the SPEAC labhttps://hrbosker.github.io (Speech Perception in Audiovisual Communication) at the Donders Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

The position is funded through an ERC Starting Grant (HearingHands, 101040276) awarded to Dr. Hans Rutger Bosker. We are looking for candidates with a strong background in speech perception and an interest in audiovisual prosody and gesture-speech integration.

You will work closely with Dr. Hans Rutger Bosker (PI) and Prof. James McQueen (promotor). The PhD project aims to determine how and when the timing of seemingly meaningless up-and-down hand gestures influences audiovisual speech perception, specifically targeting more naturalistic communicative settings. You will use virtual avatars, allowing careful control of their gestural movements, to establish which kinematic and communicative properties of hand gestures influence low-level speech perception. You will assess how challenging listening conditions impact the perceptual weighting of visual, auditory and audiovisual cues to prominence, as well as determine the time-course of these cues using eye-tracking. Finally, you will design training studies to test how humans adjust their perception to between-talker variation in gesture-speech alignment.

- 4 year contract, 1.0 FTE

- gross monthly salary: ? 2,541 - ? 3,247 (scale P)

- application deadline: May 22, 2023

- preferred starting date: September 1, 2023

More details about the project, profile, and what we have to offer is available through the link below. If you have any questions, do get in touch at HansRutger.Bosker@donders.ru.nl

https://www.ru.nl/en/working-at/job-opportunities/phd-candidate-audiovisual-speech-perception-at-the-donders-centre-for-cognition

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University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Laboratory for Speech Physiology and Motor Control 

Post-doctoral position in speech sensorimotor learning in typical adults,

DBS patients, and adults who stutter

The Laboratory for Speech Physiology and Motor Control (PI Ludo Max, Ph.D.) at the University of Washington (Seattle) is seeking to fill a post-doctoral position in the areas of sensorimotor integration and sensorimotor learning for speech production. The position will involve experimental work on sensorimotor adaptation, sensory prediction, and error evaluation in typical adults, Parkinson’s and essential tremor patients with deep brain stimulation implants (DBS), and adults who stutter. The lab is located in the University of Washington's Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences and has additional affiliations with the Graduate Program in Neuroscience, the Department of Bioengineering, and the Department of Linguistics.

The successful candidate will use speech sensorimotor adaptation paradigms (with digital signal processing perturbations applied to the real-time auditory feedback or mechanical loads applied to the jaw by a robotic device) to investigate various aspects of motor learning and control. Data collection will involve acoustic, kinematic, and neural data to investigate auditory-motor interactions during speech movement planning and execution.

The appointment is initially for one year, with renewal possible contingent upon satisfactory performance and productivity. We are looking for a candidate available to start in the summer of 2023, and applicants should have completed all requirements for their Ph.D. degree by that time. Review of applications will begin immediately. Candidates with a Ph.D. degree in neuroscience, cognitive/behavioral neuroscience, motor control/kinesiology, biomedical engineering, communication disorders/speech science, and related fields, are encouraged to apply.

For more information, please contact lab director Ludo Max, Ph.D. (LudoMax@uw.edu). Applications can be submitted to the same e-mail address. Interested candidates should submit (a) a cover letter describing their research experiences, interests, and goals, (b) a curriculum vitae, (c) the names and contact information of three individuals who can serve as references, and (d) reprints of relevant journal publications.

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Dans le cadre d'un projet PIA, nous avons trois offres de post-doc d'une durée de 2 ans,
ouvertes sur le site toulousain : reconnaissance automatique de la parole, analyse de
sentiments et modélisation de préférences, pour un assistant vocal embarqué dans les
véhicules.

Plus d'info ici : https://www.irit.fr/~Thomas.Pellegrini/pdf/postdoc_3offers_2023.pdf

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Offre d’emploi : 1 Chargé.e de recherche et développement (H/F) Conversion neuronale de l’identité vocale pour la réalisation d’attaques adverses

Disponibilité et durée : 18 mois, de préférence à partir du 01 juin 2023

Description du poste: Dans le cadre du projet ANR BRUEL (2022-2026), l’équipe Analyse et Synthèse des sons recherche un.e chargé.e de recherche pour la conception, l’implémentation, et l’apprentissage d’algorithmes de conversion neuronale de l’identité vocale pour la création d’attaques d’usurpation d’identité. A partir d’un ensemble de scénarios d’attaques envisagées pour réaliser ces attaques en fonction des moyens et ressources disponibles (expertise, algorithmes, données), les travaux consisteront dans un premier temps à réaliser l’implémentation d’un banc d’essais d’algorithmes pour évaluer la robustesse des systèmes d’authentification et de détection face à ces attaques. Les travaux porteront dans un second temps sur l’une ou plusieurs des problématiques suivantes : - L’apprentissage de la conversion d’identité à partir de données de qualité hétérogène et dégradée (compression, bruits, etc…) librement accessibles (par exemple sur internet), et le transfert d’identité à partir de peu de données par des stratégies d’adaptation neuronale à partir de peu d’exemples; - La génération de conversions avec un contrôle de l’emprunte acoustique pour que l’attaque soit adaptée à l’environnement sonore et au canal de communication en fonction des scénarios envisagés (depuis des conditions professionnelles jusqu’à des conditions dégradées de communication téléphonique ou internet). L’ensemble des travaux réalisés seront évalués selon les protocoles usuels en conversion d’identité vocale, mais également en relation avec les partenaires du projet pour mesurer les performances des systèmes d’authentification/détection en fonction des scénarios envisagés. Les avancées réalisées seront intégrées au système de conversion neuronale de l'identité vocale de l’Ircam et évaluées in situ dans le cadre de productions professionnelles et/ou artistiques réalisées à l’Ircam. Le.a chargé.e de recherche collaborera également avec l’équipe de développement et participera aux activités du projet (évaluation des algorithmes, réunions, spécifications, livrables, rapports).

Présentation du projet BRUEL Le projet ANR BRUEL (ElaBoRation d’Une méthodologie d’EvaLuation des systèmes d’identification par la voix) concerne l’évaluation/certification des systèmes d’identification par la voix face aux attaques adverses. En effet, les systèmes de reconnaissance automatique du locuteur sont vulnérables non seulement à la parole produite artificiellement par synthèse vocale, mais aussi à d'autres formes d'attaques telles que la conversion d’identité vocale et la relecture. Les artefacts créés lors de la création ou la manipulation de ces attaques frauduleuses constituent les marques laissées dans le signal par les algorithmes de synthèse vocale permettant ainsi de distinguer la voix réelle originale d’une voix usurpée. Dans ces conditions, la détection de l'usurpation d'identité requiert d'évaluer les contre-mesures d'usurpation d'identité en même temps que les systèmes de reconnaissance du locuteur. Le projet BRUEL ambitionne de proposer la première méthodologie d’évaluation/certification des systèmes d'identification par la voix basée sur une approche Critères Communs.

Contexte de travail Le travail sera effectué à l’IRCAM au sein de l’équipe Analyse et Synthèse des sons encadré par Nicolas Obin et Axel ROEBEL (SU, CNRS, IRCAM). Le travail pourra être mené partiellement à distance, avec la nécessité d’une participation aux réunions d’avancement du projet. L'Ircam est une association à but non lucratif, associée au Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, dont les missions comprennent des activités de recherche, de création et de pédagogie autour de la musique du XXème siècle et de ses relations avec les sciences et technologies. Au sein de l'unité mixte de recherche, UMR 9912 STMS (Sciences et Technologies de la Musique et du Son) commune à l’Ircam, à Sorbonne Université, au CNRS, et au Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, des équipes spécialisées mènent des travaux de recherche et de développement informatique dans les domaines de l'acoustique, du traitement des signaux sonores, des sciences cognitives, des technologies d’interaction, de l’informatique musicale et de la musicologie.

L'Ircam est situé au centre de Paris à proximité du Centre Georges Pompidou au 1, Place Stravinsky 75004 Paris.

Expérience et compétences requises: Nous recherchons un.e candidat.e spécialisé.e en apprentissage de réseaux de neurones profonds et en traitement automatique de la parole ou en vision, de préférence en deep fakes. Le·a candidate devra avoir une thèse de doctorat en sciences informatiques dans les domaines de l’apprentissage par réseaux de neurones profonds, ainsi que des publications dans des conférences et revues reconnues dans le domaine. Le·a candidat·e idéal·e aura:

• Une solide expertise en apprentissage machine, et en particulier en réseaux de neurones profonds.

• Une bonne expérience en traitement automatique de la parole ; de préférence dans le domaine de la génération ou des deep-fakes;

• Maîtrise du traitement du signal audio-vidéo numérique;

• Une excellente maîtrise du langage de programmation Python, de l’environnement TensorFlow pour l’apprentissage de réseaux de neurones, et du calcul distribué sur des serveurs GPUs

• Excellente maîtrise de l’anglais scientifique parlé et écrit

• Autonomie, travail en équipe, productivité, rigueur et méthodologie

Salaire Selon formation et expérience professionnelle

Candidatures Prière d'envoyer une lettre de motivation et un CV détaillant le niveau d'expérience/expertise dans les domaines mentionnés ci-dessus (ainsi que tout autre information pertinente) à Nicolas.Obin@ircam.fr et Axel.Roebel@ircam.fr Date limite de candidature 31 mai 2023

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Offre d’emploi : 1 Chargé.e de recherche et développement (H/F) Génération de deep fakes audio-visuel

Disponibilité et durée : 15 mois, de préférence à partir du 01 juin 2023

Description du poste Dans le cadre du projet ASTRID DeTOX (2023-2025), l’équipe Analyse et Synthèse des sons recherche un.e chargé.e de recherche pourl’implémentation et l’apprentissage d’algorithmes pour la génération de deep fakes audio-visuels avec les missions suivantes : - Collection, implémentation, et apprentissage d’algorithmes représentatifs de l’état-del’art pour la génération de deep fakes audio et visuel - Implémentation d’un nouvel algorithme de génération de deep fakes audio-visuel avec synchronisation des deux modalités en particulier pour assurer la cohérence de la parole et du mouvement du lèvre et du bas du visage - Construction de bases de données audio-visuel des personnes ciblées et apprentissage de modèles de génération de deep fakes pour ces personnes Le.a chargé.e de recherche collaborera également avec l’équipe de développement et participera aux activités du projet (évaluation des algorithmes, réunions, spécifications, livrables, rapports). Présentation du projet DeTOX Les récents challenges ont montré qu'il était extrêmement difficile de mettre au point des détecteurs universels de vidéos hyper-truquées - à l'exemple des 'deep fakes' utilisés pour contrefaire l'identité d'une personne. Lorsque les détecteurs sont exposés à des vidéos générées par un algorithme nouveau, c'est-à-dire inconnu lors de la phase d'apprentissage, les performances sont encore extrêmement limitées. Pour la partie vidéo, les algorithmes examinent les images une par une, sans tenir compte de l'évolution de la dynamique faciale au cours du temps. Pour la partie vocale, la voix est générée de manière indépendante de la vidéo ; en particulier, la synchronisation audio-vidéo entre la voix et les mouvements des lèvres n'est pas prise en compte. Ceci constitue un point faible important des algorithmes de génération de vidéos hyper-truquées. Le présent projet vise à implémenter et à apprendre des algorithmes de détection de deepfakes personnalisés sur des individus pour lesquels on peut disposer et/ou fabriquer de nombreuses séquences audio-vidéo réelles et falsifiées. En se basant sur des briques technologiques de base en audio et vidéo récupérées de l'état de l'art, le projet se concentrera sur la prise en compte de l'évolution temporelle des signaux audio-visuels et de leur cohérence pour la génération et la détection. Nous souhaitons ainsi démontrer qu'en utilisant simultanément l’audio et la vidéo et en se focalisant sur une personne précise lors de l'apprentissage et de la détection, il est possible de concevoir des détecteurs efficaces même face à des générateurs encore non répertoriés. De tels outils permettront de scruter et de détecter sur le web d'éventuelles vidéos hyper-truquées de personnalités françaises importantes (président de la république, journalistes, chef d'étatmajor des armées, ...) et ce dès leur publication.

Contexte de travail Le travail sera effectué à l’IRCAM au sein de l’équipe Analyse et Synthèse des sons encadré par Nicolas Obin et Axel ROEBEL (SU, CNRS, IRCAM). Le travail pourra être mené partiellement à distance, avec la nécessité d’une participation aux réunions d’avancement du projet. L'Ircam est une association à but non lucratif, associée au Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, dont les missions comprennent des activités de recherche, de création et de pédagogie autour de la musique du XXème siècle et de ses relations avec les sciences et technologies. Au sein de l'unité mixte de recherche, UMR 9912 STMS (Sciences et Technologies de la Musique et du Son) commune à l’Ircam, à Sorbonne Université, au CNRS, et au Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, des équipes spécialisées mènent des travaux de recherche et de développement informatique dans les domaines de l'acoustique, du traitement des signaux sonores, des sciences cognitives, des technologies d’interaction, de l’informatique musicale et de la musicologie.

L'Ircam est situé au centre de Paris à proximité du Centre Georges Pompidou au 1, Place Stravinsky 75004 Paris.

Expérience et compétences requises Nous recherchons un.e candidat.e spécialisé.e en apprentissage de réseaux de neurones profonds et en traitement automatique de la parole ou en vision, de préférence en deep fakes. Le·a candidate devra avoir une thèse de doctorat en sciences informatiques dans les domaines de l’apprentissage par réseaux de neurones profonds, ainsi que des publications dans des conférences et revues reconnues dans le domaine. Le·a candidat·e idéal·e aura:

• Une solide expertise en apprentissage machine, et en particulier en réseaux de neurones profonds.

• Une bonne expérience en traitement automatique de la parole ou en vision ; de préférence dans le domaine des deep-fakes;

• Maîtrise du traitement du signal audio-vidéo numérique;

• Une excellente maîtrise du langage de programmation Python, de l’environnement TensorFlow pour l’apprentissage de réseaux de neurones, et du calcul distribué sur des serveurs GPUs

• Excellente maîtrise de l’anglais scientifique parlé et écrit

• Autonomie, travail en équipe, productivité, rigueur et méthodologie

Salaire Selon formation et expérience professionnelle

Candidatures Prière d'envoyer une lettre de motivation et un CV détaillant le niveau d'expérience/expertise dans les domaines mentionnés ci-dessus (ainsi que tout autre information pertinente) à Nicolas.Obin@ircam.fr et Axel.Roebel@ircam.fr Date limite de candidature 31 mai 2023

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PhD Title: SUMMA-Sound : SUMMarization of Activities of daily living using Sound-based activity recognition Partnership:

IMT Atlantique : Campus ☒ Brest ☐ Nantes ☐ Rennes Laboratory : Lab-STICC Doctoral school : ☒ SPIN ☐ 3MG Funding: IMT Atlantique, co-tutelle with Instituto Superior Técnico

Context : IMT Atlantique, internationally recognised for the quality of its research, is a leading general engineering school under the aegis of the French Ministry of Industry and Digital Technology, ranked in the three main international rankings (THE, SHANGHAI, QS). Located on three campuses, Brest, Nantes and Rennes, IMT Atlantique aims to combine digital technology and energy to transform society and industry through training, research and innovation. It aims to be the leading French higher education and research institution in this field on an international scale. With 290 researchers and permanent lecturers, 1000 publications and 18 M€ of contracts, it supervises 2300 students each year and its training courses are based on cutting-edge research carried out within 6 joint research units: GEPEA, IRISA, LATIM, LABSTICC, LS2N and SUBATECH. The proposed thesis is part of the research activities of the team RAMBO (Robot interaction, Ambient systems, Machine learning, Behaviour, Optimization) and of the laboratory Lab-STICC and the department of Computer Science of IMT Atlantique. Scientific context: The objective of this thesis is to develop a method for collecting and summarizing domestic health-related data relevant for medical diagnosis, in a non-intrusive manner using audio information. This research addresses the lack of existing practical tools for providing high-level succinct information to medical staff on the evolution of patients they follow for health diagnostic purposes. This research is based on the assumption that valuable diagnostic data can be collected by observing short- and long-term lifestyle changes and behavioural anomalies. It relies on the latest advances in the domains of audio-based activity recognition, summarization of human activity, and health diagnosis. Research on health diagnosis in domestic environments has already explored a variety of sensors and modalities for gathering data on human health indicators [5]. Nevertheless, audio-based activity recognition is notable for its less intrusive nature. Employing state-of-the-art sound-based activity recognition models [2] to monitor domestic human activity, the thesis will investigate and develop methods for summarization of human activity [3] in a human-understandable language, in order to produce easily interpretable data by doctors who, remotely, monitor their patients [4]. This work continues and fosters the research of the RAMBO team at IMT Atlantique on ambient systems, enabling well ageing at home for the elderly adults or dependent populations [1]. We expect this thesis to provide technology likely to relieve the burden on gerontologists and elderly-care facilities, and alleviate the caregiver shortage by offering some automatic support to the task of monitoring elderly or handicapped people, enabling them to age-at-home while still being followed by medical specialists using automated means. Expected contributions of the thesis Scientific goals: (1) Determine the set of human activities relevant for health diagnosis, (2) Implement a state-of-the-art model for audio-based activity recognition and validate its function by clinicians, (3) Develop a model for summarizing the evolution of human activity over time intervals of arbitrary duration (typically spanning from days to months and possibly years). Expected outcomes of the PhD: (1) A model for semantic summarization of human activity, based on sound recognition of activities of daily living. (2) A proof of concept for this model Candidate profile and required skills: • Master Degree in Computer Science (or equivalent) • Programming and Software Engineering skills (Python, Git, Software Architecture Design) • Data science skills • Machine learning skills • English speaking and writing skills References: [1] Damien Bouchabou. “Human activity recognition in smart homes : tackling data variability using context-dependent deep learning, transfer learning and data synthesis”. Theses. Ecole nationale supérieure Mines-Télécom Atlantique, May 2022. url: https://theses.hal.science/tel-03728064. [2] Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE). url: https://dcase.community/challenge2022/task-soundevent-detection-in-domestic-environments (visited on 07/01/2022). [3] P Durga et al. “When less is better: A summarization technique that enhances clinical effectiveness of data”. In: Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Digital Health. 2018, pp. 116–120. [4] Akshay Jain et al. “Linguistic summarization of in-home sensor data”. In: Journal of Biomedical Informatics 96 (2019), p. 103240. issn: 1532-0464. [5] Mostafa Haghi Kashani et al. “A systematic review of IoT in healthcare: Applications, techniques, and trends”. In: Journal of Network and Computer Applications 192 (2021), p. 103164. Work Plan: The thesis will be organised in the following steps: (1) Definition of pertinent sounds and activities for health diagnosis, (2) Hardware set-up, (3) Dataset constitution, (4) Activity recognition, (5) Diarization of activities, (6) Summarization, (7) Validation in a real environment. Application: To apply for this position, please send an email with your Curriculum Vitae, a document with your academic results (if possible), and a couple of lines describing your motivation to pursue a PhD to mihai[dot]andries[at]imt-atlantique[dot]fr before 16 May 2023. Additional Information :  Application deadline : 16 May 2023  Start date : Fall 2023  Contract duration: 36 months  Localisation - Location : Brest (France) and Lisbon (Portugal)  Contact(s) : Mihai ANDRIES (mihai[dot]andries[at]imt-atlantique.fr) Plinio Moreno (plinio[at]isr.tecnico.ulisboa.pt)

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We are looking for a PhD student who is interested in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Human-Robot Interaction.  The doctoral student will work in a newly funded project at the  Department of Speech, Music and Hearing within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH. The project is financed by the Swedish AI-program WASP (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program) which offers a graduate school with research visits, partner universities, and visiting lecturers.

The newly started project is titled 'Anticipatory Control in Conversational Human-Robot Interaction'. The aim of the project is to use self-supervised learning to develop generic language models for human-robot interaction and explore how such models can be used in real time to predict and anticipate human behavior and thereby improve the interaction. Whereas traditional language models in NLP (such as BERT, GPT) have focused on written language, we want to model multi-modal conversation, where aspects such as engagement, turn-taking, and incremental processing are of importance. This means that the models will have to process both text, audio and video, including aspects such as how the human users move and their facial expressions.

In collaboration with industry and other projects, we will then explore how such models can be used for social robotic applications. Another important focus will be on model analysis and visualization.

For more information about the position, see https://www.kth.se/en/om/work-at-kth/lediga-jobb/what:job/jobID:623390/where:4/

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact Prof. Gabriel Skantze

(skantze@kth.se)

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Nous proposons une offre de thèse en acoustique-aérodynamique-mécatronique de la parole, dans le cadre du projet ANR AVATARS (« Artificial Voice production: control of bio-inspired port-HAmilToniAn numeRical and mechatronic modelS », 2023-2027). Le sujet porte sur la  'Caractérisation du comportement vocal humain dans la parole et dans le chant sur banc mécatronique robotisé. Application au développement de plis vocaux biomimétiques.'

Pour plus d'information et pour candidater :
https://www.gipsa-lab.grenoble-inp.fr/~nathalie.henrich/docs/PhDposition_ANR-AVATARS_GIPSA_2023.pdf

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Nous recherchons pour l'année 2023-2024 une personne pour un CDD 50% enseignement et
recherche en Phonétique.

Les infos sont à retrouver ici:
https://emploi.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/offres/enseignants-enseignants-chercheurs-contractuels/enseignant-e-chercheur-e-en-phonetique-1240660.kjsp?RH=TLK_CDD_ENS

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Nous recherchons un·e candidat·e pour une thèse sur la modélisation computationnelle du
lien perception-production en parole. La thèse sera codirigée par A. Basirat
(https://scalab.univ-lille.fr) et J. Diard (https://lpnc.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/). Les
informations concernant le projet, les compétences attendues et la modalité de
candidature sont disponibles à l’adresse ci-dessous :

https://emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Doctorant/UMR9193-ANABAS-001/Default.aspx

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Job Offer: PhD Causal Machine Learning Applied to NLP and the Study of Large Language
Models.
Starting date: November 1st, 2023 (flexible)
Application deadline: From now until the position is filled
Interviews (tentative):  Beginning of June and latter if the position is still open
Salary: ~2000€ gross/month (social security included)
Mission: research oriented (teaching possible but not mandatory)
Place of work (no remote): Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble, CNRS, Grenoble, France

Keywords: natural language processing, causal machine learning, interpretability,
analysis, robustness, large language models, controllability

Description:
Natural language processing (NLP) has undergone a paradigm shift in recent years, owing
to the remarkable breakthroughs achieved by large language models (LLMs). Despite being
purely 'correlation machines' [CorrelationMachine], these models have completely altered
the landscape of NLP by demonstrating impressive results in language modeling,
translation, and summarization. Nonetheless, the use of LLMs has also surfaced crucial
questions regarding their reliability and transparency. As a result, there is now an
urgent need to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms governing the behavior of
LLMs, to interpret their decisions and outcomes in principled and scientifically grounded
ways.

A promising direction to carry out such analysis comes from the fields of causal analysis
and causal inference [CausalAbstraction]. Examining the causal relationships between the
inputs, outputs, and hidden states of LLMs, can help to build scientific theories about
the behavior of these complex systems. Furthermore, causal inference methods can help
uncover underlying causal mechanisms behind the complex computations of LLMs, giving hope
to better interpret their decisions and understand their limitations [Rome].

Thus, the use of causal analysis in the study of LLMs is a promising research direction
to gain deeper insights into the workings of these models.
As a Ph.D student working on this project, you will be expected to develop a strong
understanding of the principles of causal inference and their application to machine
learning, see for example the invariant language model framework [InvariantLM]. You will
have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge research projects in NLP, contributing to
the development of more reliable and interpretable LLMs. It is important to note that the
Ph.D. research project should be aligned with your interests and expertise. Therefore,
the precise direction of the research can and will be influenced by the personal taste
and research goals of the students. It is encouraged that you bring your unique
perspective and ideas to the table.

SKILLS
Master degree in Natural Language Processing, computer science or data science.
Mastering Python programming and deep learning frameworks.
Experience in causal inference or working with LLMs
Very good communication skills in English, (French not needed).

SCIENTIFIC ENVIRONMENT
The thesis will be conducted within the Getalp teams of the LIG laboratory
(https://lig-getalp.imag.fr/). The GETALP team has a strong expertise and track record in
Natural Language Processing. The recruited person will be welcomed within the team which
offer a stimulating, multinational and pleasant working environment.
The means to carry out the PhD will be provided both in terms of missions in France and
abroad and in terms of equipment. The candidate will have access to the cluster of GPUs
of both the LIG. Furthermore, access to the National supercomputer Jean-Zay will enable
to run large scale experiments.
The Ph.D. position will be co-supervised by Maxime Peyrard and François Portet.
Additionally, the Ph.D. student will also be working with external academic collaborators
at EPFL and Idiap (e.g., Robert West and Damien Teney)

INSTRUCTIONS FOR APPLYING
Applications must contain: CV + letter/message of motivation + master notes + be ready to
provide letter(s) of recommendation; and be addressed to Maxime Peyrard
(maxime.peyrard@epfl.ch) and François Portet (francois.Portet@imag.fr)


[InvariantLM] Peyrard, Maxime and Ghotra, Sarvjeet and Josifoski, Martin and Agarwal,
Vidhan and Patra, Barun and Carignan, Dean and Kiciman, Emre and Tiwary, Saurabh and
West, Robert, 'Invariant Language Modeling' Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing (2022): 5728–5743

[CorrelationMachine] Feder, Amir and Keith, Katherine A. and Manzoor, Emaad and Pryzant,
Reid and Sridhar, Dhanya and Wood-Doughty, Zach and Eisenstein, Jacob and Grimmer, Justin
and Reichart, Roi and Roberts, Margaret E. and Stewart, Brandon M. and Veitch, Victor and
Yang, Diyi, 'Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction,
Interpretation and Beyond' Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
(2022), 10:1138–1158.

[CausalAbstraction] Geiger, Atticus and Wu, Zhengxuan and Lu, Hanson and Rozner, Josh and
Kreiss, Elisa and Icard, Thomas and Goodman, Noah and Potts, Christopher, 'Inducing
Causal Structure for Interpretable Neural Networks' Proceedings of Machine Learning
Research (2022): 7324-7338.

[Rome] Meng, Kevin, et al. 'Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT.' Advances
in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (2022): 17359-17372.

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The application deadline is ** June 2, 2023 **

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In the framework of the PEPR Santé numérique “Autonom-Health” project (Health, behaviors and autonomous digital technologies), the speech and language research group at the Computer Science Lab in Bordeaux, France (LaBRI) and the LORIA (Nancy, France) are looking for candidates for a fully funded PhD position (36 months).  

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Open faculty position at KU Leuven, Belgium: junior professor in Synergistic Processing
of Multisensory Data for Audio-Visual Understanding

KU Leuven's Faculty of Engineering Science has an open position for a junior professor
(tenure track) in the area of audiovisual understanding. The successful candidate will
conduct research on synergetic processing of multisensory data for audio-visual
understanding, teach courses in the Master of Engineering Science and supervise students
in the Master and PhD programs. The candidate will be embedded in the PSI research
division of the Department of Electrical Engineering. More information is available at
https://www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jobsite/jobs/60193566?hl=en&lang=en . The deadline for
applications is September 29, 2023.

KU Leuven is committed to creating a diverse environment. It explicitly encourages
candidates from groups that are currently underrepresented at the university to submit
their applications.

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PhD in ML/NLP – Fairness and self-supervised learning for speech processing
Starting date: October 1st, 2023 (flexible)
Application deadline: June 9th, 2023
Interviews (tentative): June 14th, 2023

Salary: ~2000€ gross/month (social security included)

Mission: research oriented (teaching possible but not mandatory)

Keywords: speech processing, fairness, bias, self-supervised learning, evaluation metrics 

CONTEXT

This thesis is in the context of the ANR project E-SSL (Efficient Self-Supervised Learning for Inclusive and Innovative Speech Technologies). Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently emerged as one of the most promising artificial intelligence (AI) methods as it becomes now feasible to take advantage of the colossal amounts of existing unlabeled data to significantly improve the performances of various speech processing tasks.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES

Speech technologies are widely used in our daily life and are expanding the scope of our action, with decision-making systems, including in critical areas such as health or legal aspects. In these societal applications, the question of the use of these tools raises the issue of the possible discrimination of people according to criteria for which society requires equal treatment, such as gender, origin, religion or disability...  Recently, the machine learning community has been confronted with the need to work on the possible biases of algorithms, and many works have shown that the search for the best performance is not the only goal to pursue [1]. For instance, recent evaluations of ASR systems have shown that performances can vary according to the gender but these variations depend both on  data used for learning and on models [2]. Therefore such systems are increasingly scrutinized for being biased while trustworthy speech technologies definitely represents a crucial expectation.

 Both the question of bias and the concept of fairness have now become important aspects of AI, and we now have to find the right threshold between accuracy and the measure of fairness. Unfortunately, these notions of fairness and bias are challenging to define and their
 meanings can greatly differ [3].

 The goals of this PhD position are threefold:

- First make a survey on the many definitions of robustness, fairness and bias with the aim of coming up with definitions and metrics fit for speech SSL models

- Then gather speech datasets with high amount of well-described metadata

- Setup an evaluation protocol for SSL models and analyzing the results.

SKILLS

• Master 2 in Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing, computer science or data science.

• Good mastering of Python programming and deep learning framework.

• Previous experience in bias in machine learning would be a plus

• Very good communication skills in English

• Good command of French would be a plus but is not mandatory 

SCIENTIFIC ENVIRONMENT

The PhD position will be co-supervised by Alexandre Allauzen (Dauphine Université PSL, Paris) and Solange Rossato and François Portet (Université Grenoble Alpes). Joint meetings are planned on a regular basis and the student is expected to spend time in both places. Moreover, two other PhD positions are open in this project.  The students, along with the partners will closely collaborate. For instance, specific SSL models along with evaluation criteria will be developed by the other PhD students. Moreover, the PhD student will collaborate with several team members involved in the project in particular the two other PhD candidates who will be recruited  and the partners from LIA, LIG and Dauphine Université PSL, Paris. The means to carry out the PhD will be provided both in terms of missions in France and abroad and in terms of equipment. The candidate will have access to the cluster of GPUs of both the LIG and Dauphine Université PSL. Furthermore, access to the National supercomputer Jean-Zay will enable to run large scale experiments.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR APPLYING

Applications must contain: CV + letter/message of motivation + master notes + be ready to provide letter(s) of recommendation; and be addressed to Alexandre Allauzen (alexandre.allauzen@espci.psl.eu), Solange Rossato (Solange.Rossato@imag.fr) and François Portet (francois.Portet@imag.fr). We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

REFERENCES:

[1] Mengesha, Z., Heldreth, C., Lahav, M., Sublewski, J. & Tuennerman, E. “I don’t Think These Devices are Very Culturally Sensitive.”—Impact of Automated Speech Recognition Errors on African Americans. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 4. issn: 2624-8212. https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frai.2021.725911 (2021).

[2] Garnerin, M., Rossato, S. & Besacier, L. Investigating the Impact  of Gender Representation in ASR Training Data: a Case Study on Librispeech in Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (2021), 86–92.
[3] Mehrabi, N., Morstatter, F., Saxena, N., Lerman, K. & Galstyan, A. A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning.  ACMComput. Surv. 54. issn: 0360-0300. https://doi.org/10.1145/3457607 (July 2021).

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In the framework of the European FETPROACT « Fvllmonti » project and the PEPR Santé numérique “Autonom-Health” project, the speech and language research group at the Computer Science Lab in Bordeaux, France (LaBRI) is looking for candidates for a 24-months post-doctoral position. 

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ELDA (Evaluations and Language resources Disctribution Agency) looks for full/part time transcriptors for transcription of phone calls in the financial domain.

Location: ELDA (Paris-France)

Latest starting date: July 2023

Languages and mission details

• German - 21h of speech to be transcribed + phonetisation task;
• Spanish - 1h of speech to be transcribed;
• Italian - 1h of speech to be transcribed;
• Japanese - 21h of speech to transcribe + phonetisation task;
• Polish - number of hours vary as it is still being tested.

Profile

• Native expertise in the selected language with a very good level of spelling and grammar;
• Good knowledge of French and/or English;
• Good computer skills;
• Ability to integrate and scrupulously follow transcription rules.

Salary and duration

• Starting from SMIC depending on skills;
• Approximately 3 months (FT for the longer assignments).

Application

• Send your CV to <lucille@elda.org> ou <gabriele@elda.org>;
• Include [Transcription *language*] in the object field.

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DRhyaDS

A new framework for understanding the Dynamic Rhythms and Decoding of Speech

Job Title - Postdoctoral Researcher

Disciplines and Areas of Research - Speech science, Psycholinguistics, Psychoacoustics

Contract Duration - 1 Year

Research Overview: The DRhyaDS project aims to develop a new framework for understanding the dynamic rhythms and decoding of speech. It focuses on exploring the temporal properties of speech and their contribution to speech perception. The project challenges the conventional view that speech rhythm perception relies on a one-to-one association between specific modulation frequencies in the speech signal and linguistic units. One of the key objectives of the project is to investigate the impact of language-specific temporal characteristics on speech dynamics. The project team will analyze two corpora of semi-spontaneous speech data from French and German, representing syllable-timed and stress-timed languages, respectively. Various acoustic analyses will be conducted on these speech corpora to explore the variability of slow temporal modulations in speech at an individual level. This comprehensive acoustic exploration will involve extracting and analyzing prosody, spectral properties, temporal dynamics, and rhythmic patterns. By examining these acoustic parameters, the project aims to uncover intricate details about the structure and variation of speech signals across languages and speakers, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic nature of spoken language and its role in human communication. Environment: The selected candidate will be an integral part of an international research team and will work in a collaborative and stimulating lab environment. The project brings together a FrancoGerman team of experts in linguistics, psychoacoustics and cognitive neuroscience, led by Dr. Léo Varnet (CNRS, ENS Paris) and Dr. Alessandro Tavano (Max Planck Institute, Goethe University Frankfurt). The successful candidate will work under the supervision of Dr Léo Varnet, at the Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs (ENS Paris).

Job description: This is a one-year postdoctoral contract position, offering a net salary in accordance with French legislation (~2500€/month + social and medical benefits). Women and minorities are strongly encouraged to apply. The successful candidate will participate in research activities, collaborate with team members, and contribute to scientific publications and communications. Additionally, they will have the autonomy to suggest and implement their own analysis techniques and approaches. Their responsibilities will include: - Taking a lead role in collecting a comprehensive corpus of French speech data, adhering to a rigorous data collection protocol - Collaborating closely with the German team to leverage the existing German speech corpus for comparative analysis and cross-linguistic investigations - Conducting in-depth acoustic analysis of the corpora, employing advanced techniques to investigate the variability and dynamics of slow temporal modulations in speech - Actively participating in team meetings, workshops, and conferences to present research progress, exchange ideas, and contribute to the intellectual growth of the project - Engaging in science outreach activities to promote the project's research outcomes and facilitate public understanding of speech perception and language processing.

Qualifications: - A recently obtained PhD in a relevant field (e.g., linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, computational sciences) - Strong expertise in linguistics, speech perception, acoustic analysis, and statistical methods - Proficiency in programming languages commonly used in speech research. Knowledge of MATLAB would be particularly valuable for data processing and analysis within the project. - Strong written and verbal communication skills in English. Candidates with proficiency in French and/or German language skills would be particularly appreciated, as it would enable a deeper understanding of the linguistic characteristics of the respective corpora.

Application process To apply for this position, please submit a CV and a cover letter (in French or English) along with the names and contact information of 2 referees to Léo Varnet (leo.varnet@cnrs.fr). The application deadline is 31th July 2023. Interviews will be conducted in September. The ideal start date is October-November 2023, with some flexibility allowed. Feel free to get in touch informally to discuss this position

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Inria is opening a fully funded PhD position on multimodal speech
anonymization. For details and to apply, see:
https://jobs.inria.fr/public/classic/en/offres/2023-06410

Applications will be reviewed on a continuous basis until July 2.

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Call for postdoc applications in Natural Language Processing for the automatic detection of gender stereotypes in the French media (Grenoble Alps University, France)

Starting date:                flexible,  November 30, 2023, at the latest

Duration:                       full-time position for 12 months

Salary:                         according to experience (up to 4142€/ month)

Application Deadline: Open until filled

Location:               The position will be based in Grenoble, France. This is not a remote work.

Keywords:             natural language processing, gender stereotypes                                 bias, corpus analysis, language models, transfer                                 learning, deep learning

*Context* The University of Grenoble Alps (UGA) has an open position for a highly motivated postdoc researcher to joint the multidisciplinary GenderedNews project. Natural Language Processing models trained on large amount of on-line content, have quickly opened new perspectives to process on-line large amount of on-line content for measuring gender bias in a daily basis (see our project https://gendered-news.imag.fr/ ). Regarding research on stereotypes, most recent works have studied Language Models (LM) from a stereotype perspective by providing specific corpora such as StereoSet (Nadeem et al., 2020) or CrowS-Pairs (Nangia et al. 2020). However, these studies are focusing on the quantifying of bias in the LM predictions rather than bias in the original data (Choenni et al., 2021). Furthermore, most of these studies ignore named entities (Deshpande et al., 2022) which account for an important part of the referents and speakers in news. In this project, we intend to build corpora, methods and NLP tools to qualify the differences between the language used to describe groups of people in French news.

*Main Tasks*

The successful postdoc will be responsible for day-to-day running of the research project, under the supervision of François Portet (Prof UGA at LIG) and Gilles Bastin (prof UGA at PACTE). Regular meetings will take place every two weeks.

- Defining the dimensions of stereotypes to be investigated and the possible metrics that can be processed from a machine learning perspective.

- Exploring, managing and curating news corpora in French for stereotypes investigation, with a view to making them widely available to the community to favor reproducible research and comparison.

- Studying and developing new computational models to process large number of texts to reveal stereotype bias in news. Make use of pretrained models for the task.

- Evaluate the methods on curated focused corpus and apply it to the unseen real longitudinal corpus and analyze the results with the team.

- Preparing articles for submission to peer-reviewed conferences and journals.

- Organizing progress meetings and liaising between members of the team. 

The hired person will interact with PhD students, interns and researchers being part of the GenderedNews project. According to his/her background his/her own interests and in accordance with the project's objective, the hired person will have the possibility to orient the research in different directions.

*Scientific Environment*

The recruited person will be hosted within the GETALP teams of the LIG laboratory (https://lig-getalp.imag.fr/), which offers a dynamic, international, and stimulating environment for conducting high-level multidisciplinary research. The person will have access to large datasets of French news, GPU servers, to support for missions as well as to the scientific activities of the labs. The team is housed in a modern building (IMAG) located in a 175-hectare landscaped campus that was ranked as the eighth most beautiful campus in Europe by the Times Higher Education magazine in 2018.

The person will also closely work with Gilles Bastin (PACTE, a Sociology lab in Grenoble) and Ange Richard (PhD at LIG and PACTE). The project also includes an informal collaboration with 'Prenons la une' (https://prenonslaune.fr/) a journalists’ association which promotes a fair representation of women in the media.

*Requirements*

The candidate must have a PhD degree in Natural Language Processing or computer science or in the process of acquiring it. The successful candidate should have

-  Good knowledge of Natural Language Processing -  Experience in corpus collection/formatting and manipulation. -  Good programming skills in Python -  Publication record in a close field of research -  Willing to work in multidisciplinary and international teams -  Good communication skills -  Good mastering of French is required

*Instructions for applying*

Applications will be considered on the fly and must be addressed to François Portet (Francois.Portet@imag.fr). It is therefore advisable to apply as soon as possible. The application file should contain

-   Curriculum vitae -   References for potential letter(s) of recommendation -   One-page summary of research background and interests for the position -   Publications demonstrating expertise in the aforementioned areas -   Pre-defense reports and defense minutes; or summary of the thesis with the date of defense for those currently in doctoral studies

*References*

Deshpande et al. (2022). StereoKG: Data-Driven Knowledge Graph Construction for Cultural Knowledge and Stereotypes. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.14036.

Choenni et al. (2021). Stepmothers are mean and academics are pretentious: What do pretrained language models learn about you? arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.10052.

Nadeem et al. (2020) StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models. ArXiv.

Nangia et al. (2020) CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models. In EMNLP2020.

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the new Postdoc-Kolleg 'Education and AI in the 21st century.

Technology-enabled innovations in subject-specific teaching

settings (PostdocTEIFUN)' of the Tübingen School of Education (TüSE)

and Professional School of Education Stuttgart-Ludwigsburg (PSE) will

start in 2024.

It is offering six Post-doc positions funded for six years (100% TVL

E14) to conduct interdisciplinary research in the field of education

and AI.

The official announcement can be found here:

https://uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet/stellenangebote/newsfullview-stellenangebote/article/6-akademische-ratsstellen-m-w-d-e-14-tv-l-100/

Among the various potential research fields, the following could be of

interest here:

'Development of didactically informed Intelligent Language Tutoring

approaches targeting spoken language learning for the English

classroom. Potential directions include but are not limited to the

realization of perceptual training, input enhancement, automatic

corrective feedback, or prosodic complexity analysis.'

Interested? Please contact us at:

Sabine Zerbian, sabine.zerbian@ifla.uni-stuttgart.de

Detmar Meurers, detmar.meurers@uni-tuebingen.de

Note that there is a tight deadline for applications: 30.06.2023

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In a joint research project *VidQA*, our collaboration partner from University of Applied Sciences (Prof. Christian Wartena, HsH Hochschule Hannover) offers a full position (three years, as soon as possible) for a PhD student:

*VidQA* is a joint research project of the Institute for Applied Data Science Hannover (DATA|H) of the HsH, the Research Center L3S of the Leibniz University and the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology. The goal of the project is the development and evaluation of new methods for semi-automatic generation of questions and answers for learning videos. Here, we pursue several research questions, such as, among others, the aspect of multimodality of video-based learning media, the generation of distractors ('wrong answers') for multiple-choice questions, and the automatic evaluation of answers for open-ended question formats.

*What you can expect*:

-  Develop and implement procedures for generating (multiple choice) questions, answers, and distractors.

-  Development and implementation of procedures for scoring free text answers

-  Collaboration in the development and evaluation of a system for examing comprehension of learning videos

-  Publication of research and development results at conferences and in professional journals

-  Participation in the organization the project

*Requirements*

Research Field: Computer science

Education Level: Master Degree or equivalent

Skills/Qualifications

-  Master's degree (or equivalent) in computer science or computational linguistics

-  In-depth knowledge in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning

-  Proven knowledge in Natural Language Processing (NLP)

-  Gender and diversity skills

Languages:     ENGLISH

Level:     Excellent

Languages:    GERMAN

Level:     Good

Website for additional job details: https://karriere.hs-hannover.de/bewerbung/beschreibung-900000104-10057.html

Where to apply: https://karriere.hs-hannover.de/bewerbung/beschreibung-900000104-10057.html

*First Contact*

************************************

Prof. Dr. Christian Wartena

University of Applied Sciences (HsH Hochschule Hannover)

Institute for Applied Data Science Hannover (DATA|H)

E-Mail: christian.wartena@hs-hannover.de

Postal address

City:    Hannover

Website:     https://www.hs-hannover.de/forschung/forschungsaktivitaeten/forschungscluster/smart-data-analytics

Street:     Expo Plaza 12

Postal Code:     30539

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Pour plus d'informations voir :
https://emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Doctorant/UMR7020-RICMAR-001/Default.aspx

Pour candidater remplissez le formulaire suivant : https://forms.gle/DdaV8BhN3E4DuXnA8

La date de clôture à candidatures est le 10 juillet 2023.

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Ingénieur chef de projet ressources et technologies linguistiques
 
Centre Inria : CRI Nancy - Grand Est 

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Call for postdoc applications in Natural Language Processing for the automatic detection of gender stereotypes in the French media (Grenoble Alps University, France)

Starting date:                flexible,  November 30, 2023, at the latest

Duration:                       full-time position for 12 months

Salary:                         according to experience (up to 4142€/ month)

Application Deadline: Open until filled

Location:               The position will be based in Grenoble, France. This is not a remote work.

Keywords:             natural language processing, gender stereotypes                                 bias, corpus analysis, language models, transfer                                 learning, deep learning

*Context* The University of Grenoble Alps (UGA) has an open position for a highly motivated postdoc researcher to joint the multidisciplinary GenderedNews project. Natural Language Processing models trained on large amount of on-line content, have quickly opened new perspectives to process on-line large amount of on-line content for measuring gender bias in a daily basis (see our project https://gendered-news.imag.fr/ ). Regarding research on stereotypes, most recent works have studied Language Models (LM) from a stereotype perspective by providing specific corpora such as StereoSet (Nadeem et al., 2020) or CrowS-Pairs (Nangia et al. 2020). However, these studies are focusing on the quantifying of bias in the LM predictions rather than bias in the original data (Choenni et al., 2021). Furthermore, most of these studies ignore named entities (Deshpande et al., 2022) which account for an important part of the referents and speakers in news. In this project, we intend to build corpora, methods and NLP tools to qualify the differences between the language used to describe groups of people in French news.

*Main Tasks*

The successful postdoc will be responsible for day-to-day running of the research project, under the supervision of François Portet (Prof UGA at LIG) and Gilles Bastin (prof UGA at PACTE). Regular meetings will take place every two weeks.

- Defining the dimensions of stereotypes to be investigated and the possible metrics that can be processed from a machine learning perspective.

- Exploring, managing and curating news corpora in French for stereotypes investigation, with a view to making them widely available to the community to favor reproducible research and comparison.

- Studying and developing new computational models to process large number of texts to reveal stereotype bias in news. Make use of pretrained models for the task.

- Evaluate the methods on curated focused corpus and apply it to the unseen real longitudinal corpus and analyze the results with the team.

- Preparing articles for submission to peer-reviewed conferences and journals.

- Organizing progress meetings and liaising between members of the team. 

The hired person will interact with PhD students, interns and researchers being part of the GenderedNews project. According to his/her background his/her own interests and in accordance with the project's objective, the hired person will have the possibility to orient the research in different directions.

*Scientific Environment*

The recruited person will be hosted within the GETALP teams of the LIG laboratory (https://lig-getalp.imag.fr/), which offers a dynamic, international, and stimulating environment for conducting high-level multidisciplinary research. The person will have access to large datasets of French news, GPU servers, to support for missions as well as to the scientific activities of the labs. The team is housed in a modern building (IMAG) located in a 175-hectare landscaped campus that was ranked as the eighth most beautiful campus in Europe by the Times Higher Education magazine in 2018.

The person will also closely work with Gilles Bastin (PACTE, a Sociology lab in Grenoble) and Ange Richard (PhD at LIG and PACTE). The project also includes an informal collaboration with 'Prenons la une' (https://prenonslaune.fr/) a journalists’ association which promotes a fair representation of women in the media.

*Requirements*

The candidate must have a PhD degree in Natural Language Processing or computer science or in the process of acquiring it. The successful candidate should have

-  Good knowledge of Natural Language Processing -  Experience in corpus collection/formatting and manipulation. -  Good programming skills in Python -  Publication record in a close field of research -  Willing to work in multidisciplinary and international teams -  Good communication skills -  Good mastering of French is required

*Instructions for applying*

Applications will be considered on the fly and must be addressed to François Portet (Francois.Portet@imag.fr). It is therefore advisable to apply as soon as possible. The application file should contain

-   Curriculum vitae -   References for potential letter(s) of recommendation -   One-page summary of research background and interests for the position -   Publications demonstrating expertise in the aforementioned areas -   Pre-defense reports and defense minutes; or summary of the thesis with the date of defense for those currently in doctoral studies

*References*

Deshpande et al. (2022). StereoKG: Data-Driven Knowledge Graph Construction for Cultural Knowledge and Stereotypes. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.14036.

Choenni et al. (2021). Stepmothers are mean and academics are pretentious: What do pretrained language models learn about you? arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.10052.

Nadeem et al. (2020) StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models. ArXiv.

Nangia et al. (2020) CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models. In EMNLP2020.

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The Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA), a company specialized in Human Language Technologies within an international context is currently seeking to fill an immediate vacancy for the permanent position: Project Manager - Intellectual Property, Personal Data Protection for AI and Language Technologies.

Job description

Under the CEO’s supervision, the Project Manager will handle legal issues related to the compilation, use and distribution of language datasets in a European and international environment. This yields excellent opportunities for creative, and motivated candidates wishing to participate actively in the Language Engineering field.

Their main tasks will consist of:

• Analysing the legal status of language datasets and language models;
• Implementing data protection requirements in the processing and distribution of language data;
• Analysing data collection legal issues;
• Drafting and negotiating distribution contracts for language datasets to be added to an online catalogue;
• Implementing evaluation procedures for IPR clearance of digital data;
• Assessing ethical practices within our activities.

The position is based in Paris.

Salary: Commensurate with qualifications and experience (between 40-60K€).

Other benefits: complementary health insurance and meal vouchers.

Required profile:

• PhD (or Master’s degree + at least 3 years’ experience) in IT Law, with good understanding of intellectual property and data protection;
• Fluent English, with advanced writing and analytical skills;
• Experience implementing data protection regulations;
• Knowledge of the European digital regulatory environment (eg. Digital Services Act, Digital Market Act, Data Act, Digital Governance Act, Open Data Directive, AI Act);
• Familiar with public licensing schemes (CC, GPL, etc.); 
• Involvement in European or international projects related to IPR and other legal aspects;
• Dynamic, communicative, flexible and capable of working independently as well as in a team;
• EU citizen, or residence permit enabling to work in France.

About

ELDA is an SME established in 1995 to promote the development and exploitation of Language Resources (LRs). Language Resources include all data necessary for language engineering, such as monolingual and multilingual lexica, text corpora, speech databases and terminology. ELDA’s role is to produce LRs, to collect and to validate them and, foremost, make them available to users in compliance with applicable regulations and ethical requirements.

For further information about ELDA, visit: http://www.elda.org  

Applicants should email a cover letter addressing the points listed above together with a curriculum vitae to:

ELDA
9 rue des Cordelières
75013 Paris
FRANCE
Email: job@elda.org

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The Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory (https://www.spsc.tugraz.at) of
Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) is looking for

    2 Research and Teaching Associates
            – PhD Positions –
    in Signal Processing and Speech Communication

with appointments planned for November 2023.

Both associates are expected to perform excellent research towards a PhD degree (often in cooperation with international partners) under the guidance of professors Gernot Kubin and Barbara Schuppler. Furthermore, the associates will co-advise Bachelor’s and Master’s student projects and develop and teach laboratory and problem classes on various aspects of signal processing. Fluency in English is a must, knowledge of German is an asset. A strong background in signal processing and/or speech communication as well as an excellent Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Information Engineering, or similar are required.

Entry-level gross yearly salaries are about EUR 45.900,- for 40 hrs per week and initial contract durations may span up to 4 years.

The Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory was the main organizer of INTERSPEECH 2019 in Graz (https://www.interspeech2019.org) and takes the lead in building a Graduate School of Excellence in European Speech and Language Technologies together with seven partners of the Unite! University Alliance (https://www.unite-university.eu). TU Graz is ranked #2 of all universities in the German speaking countries (https://www.umultirank.org).

Graz (https://www.graztourismus.at/en) is the second largest city of Austria located in the south-eastern province of Styria at the cross-roads of major continental European cultures. It enjoys a vibrant student life with eight universities and excellent leisure and sports opportunities in the larger Alps-Adriatic region. UNESCO has included the historic centre of Graz in its World Heritage List and Graz has been a Cultural Capital of Europe.

For further information, please contact the two advisors
Gernot Kubin at gernot.kubin@tugraz.at  and Barbara Schuppler at b.schuppler@tugraz.at.

Applications are due by September 27, 2023, and must be submitted electronically at
https://jobs.tugraz.at/en/jobs/b645ee47-c3aa-712a-29b3-64d61edea5e6.

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Job Offer: PhD Self-supervised models for transcribing the spontaneous speech of for 3- to 6-year-old children in French

Starting date: between October 1st and December 1st, 2023 (flexible) Application deadline: From now until the position is filled Interviews: from September or latter if the position is still open

Salary: ~2000€ gross/month (social security included)

Mission: research oriented (teaching possible but not mandatory)

Place of work: Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble, CNRS, Grenoble,France

Keywords: deep learning, natural language processing, speech recognition for children's voices, documentation of language development

Description As part of the Artificial Intelligence & Language Chair at the Multidisciplinary Institute in Artificial Intelligence (; https://miai.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/research/chairs/perception-interaction/artificialintelligence-language-850480.kjsp?RH=6499588038450843), we offer a PhD thesis topic devoted to the enriched automatic transcription of the spontaneous speech of 3- to 6-year-old children using an architecture based on self-supervised models [1]. These methods have emerged as one of the most successful approaches in artificial intelligence (AI), as they allow to exploit a colossal amount of existing unlabeled data and so achieve significantly higher performance for many domains. As part of the DyLNet project (Language dynamics, linguistic learning, and sociability at preschool: benefits of wireless proximity sensors in collecting big data ; https://dylnet.univ-grenoblealpes.fr/), coordinated by A. Nardy, a children's speech collection was carried out in a socially mixed preschool over a period of 2 and a half years [2]. Each year, around 100 children wore a box fitted with microphones that continuously recorded their speech. These boxes were worn for one week a month. We thus collected ~ 30,000 hours of recordings, 815 of which were transcribed and annotated by linguists. This unprecedentedly large corpus of children's spoken French will enable to meet the technical challenges associated with automatic speech processing. While continuous and unsupervised collection methods are now available, another challenge is the automatic transcription of children's voices, made difficult by their acoustic characteristics. The aim of the thesis is to design a transcription system for researchers as well as child development professionals (teachers, speech therapists, etc.). The aim of the thesis is therefore to: - review the state-of-the-art models and the performances achieved by automatic transcription tools for children's voices - implement processes to exploit the mass of audio data collected, and the associated metadata (sociodemographic information on participants, contexts of enunciation, interlocutors, etc.). - design and develop a system for transcribing children's speech using self-supervised tools, as proposed by Speechbrain [3]. The best system obtained will be made available to the language acquisition research community and child development professionals. - set up a system evaluation protocol based on transcribed data - propose tools for automating some of the linguistic analyses to enrich the obtained transcriptions and document oral language development in 3- to 6-year-old children. Skills : Master degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence or Data Science Mastering Python programming and deep learning frameworks. Experience in automatic natural language processing will be really appreciated Excellent communication skills in French or, failing that, in English Scientific environment : The PhD. position will be co-supervised by Benjamin Lecouteux, Solange Rossato (LIG, Univ. Grenoble Alpes) et Aurélie Nardy (Lidilem, Univ. Grenoble Alpes). The recruited person will be part of the GETALP team of the LIG laboratory (https://lig-getalp.imag.fr/) which has extensive expertise and experience in the field of Natural Language Processing. The GETALP team offers a stimulating, multinational working environment, and provides the resources needed to complete the thesis in terms of equipment and scientific exchanges. Regular meetings with the three supervisors will take place throughout the thesis.

Instructions for applying Application forms must contain: CV + letter/message of motivation + master + notes + be ready to provide letter(s) of recommendation. They should be addressed to Benjamin Lecouteux (benjamin.lecouteux@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr), Solange Rossato (solange.rossato@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr) and Aurélie Nardy (aurelie.nardy@univ-grenoblealpes.fr).

[1] Evain, S., Nguyen, H., Le, H., Boito, M. Z., Mdhaffar, S., Alisamir, S., ... & Besacier, L. (2021). Lebenchmark: A reproducible framework for assessing self-supervised representation learning from speech. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2104.11462

[2] Nardy, A., Bouchet, H., Rousset, I., Liégeois, L., Buson, L., Dugua, C., Chevrot, J.-P. (2021). Variation sociolinguistique et réseau social : constitution et traitement d’un corpus de données orales massives. Corpus, 22 [en ligne]. https://doi.org/10.4000/corpus.5561

[3] Ravanelli, M., Parcollet, T., Plantinga, P., Rouhe, A., Cornell, S., Lugosch, L., ... & Bengio, Y. (2021). SpeechBrain: A general-purpose speech toolkit. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.0462

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Anticipated Start Date:   (Mid August, 2024)

DETAILED JOB DESCRIPTION:     

The Department of Psychology at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT; www.rit.edu/psychology) invites candidates to apply for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position starting in August 2024.  We are seeking an energetic and enthusiastic psychologist who will serve as an instructor, researcher, and mentor to students in our undergraduate (Psychology, Neuroscience) and graduate programs (Masters in Experimental Psychology, Ph.D. in Cognitive Science). We are particularly looking to build a cohort of faculty who can contribute to the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Cognitive Science and contribute to research, mentoring, and teaching using computational and laboratory methods. Candidates should have expertise in an area of Cognitive Science such as cognitive or behavioral neuroscience, AI, computational/psycho-linguistics, cognitive psychology, comparative psychology, or related areas. We are particularly interested in individuals whose area of research expertise expands the current expertise of the faculty. Candidates who can teach courses in natural language processing or computational modeling courses are especially encouraged to apply.  The Department of Psychology at RIT serves a rapidly expanding student population at a technical university. The position requires a strong commitment to teaching and mentoring, active research and publication, and a strong potential to attract external funding. Teaching and research are priorities for faculty at RIT, and all faculty are expected to mentor students through advising, research and in-class experiences. The successful candidate will be able to teach courses in our undergraduate cognitive psychology track (Memory & Attention, Language & Thought, Decision Making, Judgement & Problem Solving), will be expected to teach research methods/statistics courses at the undergraduate and graduate level, and teach and mentor students in our graduate programs. In addition, candidates must be able to do research and work effectively within the department’s existing lab space. RIT provides many opportunities for collaborative research across the institute in many diverse disciplines such as AI, Digital Humanities, Human-Centered Computing, and Cybersecurity.

We are seeking individuals who have the ability and interest in contributing to a community committed to student-centeredness; professional development and scholarship; integrity and ethics; respect, diversity and pluralism; innovation and flexibility; and teamwork and collaboration. Select to view links to RIT’s core values, honor code, and statement of diversity.

THE COLLEGE/ DEPARTMENT:    

The Department of Psychology at RIT offers B.S., M.S. degrees, Advanced Certificates, minors, immersions, electives, and a new interdisciplinary Ph.D. degree program in Cognitive Science. The B.S. degree provides a general foundation in psychology with specialized training in one of five tracks: biopsychology, clinical psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and developmental psychology.  The M.S. degree is in Experimental Psychology, with an Advanced Certificate offered in Engineering Psychology. We offer accelerated BS/MS programs with AI, Sustainability, and Experimental Psychology. The Ph.D. degree is in Cognitive Science and the program is broadly interdisciplinary with several partner units across the university. We also offer joint B.S. degrees in Human Centered Computing and Neuroscience. 

The College of Liberal Arts is one of nine colleges within Rochester Institute of Technology. The College has over 150 faculty in 13 departments in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The College currently offers fourteen undergraduate degree programs and five Master degrees, serving over 800 students.

THE UNIVERSITY:

Founded in 1829, Rochester Institute of Technology is a diverse and collaborative community of engaged, socially conscious, and intellectually curious minds. Through creativity and innovation, and an intentional blending of technology, the arts and design, we provide exceptional individuals with a wide range of academic opportunities, including a leading research program and an internationally recognized education for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Beyond our main campus in Rochester, New York, RIT has international campuses in China, Croatia, Dubai, and Kosovo. And with more than 19,000 students and more than 125,000 graduates from all 50 states and over 100 nations, RIT is driving progress in industries and communities around the world. Find out more at www.rit.edu . 

REQUIRED MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

• Have PhD., or PhD. expected by July 1, 2024 in cognitive psychology or cognitive science related specialty (e.g. linguistics);
• Have demonstrated ability to conduct independent research in psychology or closely related fields;
• Have consistently and recently published;
• Have demonstrated teaching ability and have taught college courses independently beyond TA;
• Have demonstrated ability to supervise student research;
• Demonstrate external research grant attainment potential;
• Demonstrate expertise in research and teaching in cognitive science;
• Show a career trajectory that emphasizes a balance between teaching and research;
• Show a fit with the Department of Psychology’s general mission, teaching, research, and resources.
• Ability to contribute in meaningful ways to the college’s continuing commitment to cultural diversity, pluralism, and individual differences.

HOW TO APPLY:

Apply online at http://careers.rit.edu/faculty; search openings, then Keyword Search 8262BR. Please submit your application, curriculum vitae, cover letter addressing the listed qualifications and upload the following attachments: 

• A brief teaching philosophy
• A research statement that includes information about previous grant work, the potential for future grants, and information about one-on-one supervision of student research
• The names, addresses and phone numbers for three references 
• Contribution to Diversity Statement

You can contact the chair of the search committee, Caroline DeLong, Ph.D. with questions on the position at: cmdgsh@rit.edu.

Review of applications will begin October 1, 2023 and will continue until an acceptable candidate is found.

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Assistant or Associate Professor of Computer Science, UTEP, El Paso, Texas

The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) invites applications for a tenured/tenure-track Associate Professor position and three tenure-track Assistant Professor Positions in Computer Science (CS) starting in fall 2024. We invite applicants from all areas of CS.  For three of the positions (including the Associate Professor position), preference will be given to those with demonstrated expertise in Artificial Intelligence.

Candidates are expected to have a record of high-quality scholarship and should be able to demonstrate the potential for excellence in both research and teaching. The department values both interdisciplinary research and industry/government experience. 

More information and application instructions are at https://www.utep.edu/cs/news/news-2023/assistantassociateprofessor.html

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PhD Title: Summarization of activities of daily living using sound-based activity recognition

We are seeking candidates for a PhD position in co-tutelle between IMT Atlantique (Brest, France) and Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, Portugal) on the topic 'Summarization of activities of daily living using sound-based activity recognition'.

Please find details in the attached PDF file.
Starting date: before et end of 2023
Closing date for applications: Oct 15, 2023

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Dans le cadre de ses activités de production de ressources linguistiques, ELDA recherche des transcripteurs (f/h) de langue maternelle tchèque à temps plein ou partiel pour la transcription de 1500 heures d’enregistrements audio et/ou la révision des transcriptions. Le nombre total d'heures à transcrire ou à réviser sera adapté selon les disponibilités du candidat ou de la candidate.

La mission aura lieu dans les locaux d'ELDA (Paris 13e) ou à distance via un espace sécurisé. La mission peut démarrer dès à présent.

Profil recherché
• Locuteur (f/h) natif du tchèque avec un très bon niveau d'orthographe et de grammaire ;
• Bonne connaissance de la langue française et/ou anglaise ;
• Bonne maîtrise d'outils informatiques ;
• Capacité à intégrer et suivre scrupuleusement des règles de transcription.

Rémunération et durée
• À partir du SMIC horaire selon le profil ;
• Fin du projet prévue pour septembre 2024 ;
• Missions et contrat selon disponibilités.

Candidature :
Envoyer un CV à <gabriele@elda.org> et <dylan@elda.org>

ELDA (Agence pour la Distribution des ressources Linguistiques et l'Evaluation)
9, rue des Cordelières
75013 Paris

www.elda.org

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Dans le cadre de ses activités de production de ressources linguistiques, ELDA recherche des transcripteurs (f/h) de langue maternelle estonienne à temps plein ou partiel pour la transcription de 1500 heures d’enregistrements audio et/ou la révision des transcriptions. Le nombre total d'heures à transcrire ou à réviser sera adapté selon les disponibilités du candidat ou de la candidate.

La mission aura lieu dans les locaux d'ELDA (Paris 13e) ou à distance via un espace sécurisé. La mission peut démarrer dès à présent.

Profil recherché
• Locuteur (f/h) natif de l'estonien avec un très bon niveau d'orthographe et de grammaire ;
• Bonne connaissance de la langue française et/ou anglaise ;
• Bonne maîtrise d'outils informatiques ;
• Capacité à intégrer et suivre scrupuleusement des règles de transcription.

Rémunération et durée
• À partir du SMIC horaire selon le profil ;
• Fin du projet prévue pour septembre 2024 ;
• Missions et contrat selon disponibilités.

Candidature :
Envoyer un CV à <gabriele@elda.org> et <dylan@elda.org>

ELDA (Agence pour la Distribution des ressources Linguistiques et l'Evaluation)
9, rue des Cordelières
75013 Paris

www.elda.org

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