Call for postdoc application in Lifelong Deep Learning for Robotics, at Flowers Lab, Inria (Bordeaux, France)

Deadline: 30th march
Eligibility: candidates should have obtained their PhD diploma after 1st september 2015
https://flowers.inria.fr

We are searching outstanding candidates for a postdoc (16 months) who will be working on algorithms
for lifelong Deep Learning for robotics, and in particular:
– unsupervised or self-supervised deep learning
– generative networks such as GANs and/or variational auto-encoders
– deep reinforcement learning for robotic control
– Intrinsic motivation
– multi-task reinforcement learning, auxiliary tasks

Selected candidates will have the opportunity to work with one of the robotics platforms of the Flowers lab, including several Poppy Humanoid robots and starting from the experimental setup that was runner up for the NIPS 2016 demonstration award, and showing intrinsically motivated multi-task reinforcement learning in real-time on real robots, with interaction with humans (http://goo.gl/03FW4k), or the Baxter humanoid robot (http://goo.gl/nSS7Yp).

Candidates should already have shown very strong experience and achievements, shown by publications in top-tier AI/machine learning conferences and journals (e.g. NIPS, ICML, ICLR) in either:
– deep learning (both theory and practical implementations)
– Reinforcement learning for policy learning of parameterized skills in robotics

How to apply
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CVs and letters of motivation should be sent to Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (pierre-yves.oudeyer@inria.fr) before 30th march.
The successful candidate would begin to work in september 2017.
Deadline: 30th march
Eligibility: candidates should have obtained their PhD diploma after 1st september 2015

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Research director, Inria
Head of Flowers Lab
Inria and Ensta ParisTech
http://www.pyoudeyer.com
https://flowers.inria.fr

More info:

The Flowers Lab: developmental robotics and lifelong multitask machine learning
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The Flowers Lab, headed by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, gathers a team of ~20 members and has been one of the pioneers of developmental robotics and lifelong machine learning and artificial intelligence in the last decade, in particular through developping models of intrinsically motivated learning of repertoires of skills that have both contributed to advance understanding of human curiosity and development, and to advance incremental online multitask machine learning techniques in difficult high-dimensional robotic spaces.

This work in the Flowers lab is conducted in the context of large international projects (e.g. ERC grant, European projects 3rdHand and DREAM, HFSP project Neurocuriosity), with interdisicplinary collaborations with other labs in neuroscience, psychology, machine learning and robotics. The successful candidates would be directly involved in these international collaborations.

The Flowers lab has recently spin-off the Pollen Robotics startup company, and is involved in multiple collaborations with industrials through Inria’s strong support towards impacting both science and industry.

Inria and EnstaParistech
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The lab is within Inria, which is a prestigious, and also the largest, public European research insitution focused on computer science, mathematics and their applications. Inria’s teams and researchers (> 2800 employees) have received prestigious awards, coordinate many international projects, and have created strong innovations now used in many parts of industry. Inria research center in Bordeaux gathers around 300 researchers. The Flowers Lab is also associated to EnstaParisTech, which is a prestigious French engineering school (university).

Bordeaux
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The Flowers lab in Bordeaux is located in a great building on the border of one of the world most famous vineyard, and 10mn by tram from Bordeaux town center (and 2 hours from Paris through high-speed trains): https://www.inria.fr/en/centre/bordeaux Bordeaux has been recently rated by Lonely Planet as the world’s best city to visit: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/best-cities-in-the-world-top-10-lonely-planet-bordeaux-cape-town-la-a7379066.html