1 Postdoc/Predoctoral Position: Center for Adaptive Rationality 1403 views

The Center for Adaptive Rationality (ARC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development seeks applicants for 1 Postdoctoral or Predoctoral Position on Machine Tools for Behavioral Science and Evidence-Informed Policy Making under the direction of Prof. Dr. Ralph Hertwig (E 13-14 TVöD; 39 hours / week). The position is available from September 2021 onwards, but later start dates are possible. The position is for three years.

About the position:

• The successful applicant will develop, deploy and empirically evaluate online machine tools (e.g., intelligent search and collaboration interfaces) that improve the scientific process and the interface between behavioral science and evidence-informed policy making to help meet the challenges arising from COVID-19 and other, future global crises (for more background, see scibeh.org).
• Applicants should have an interest in meta science, open science, open data, science communication and policy. There are no teaching obligations associated with the position.
• The successful applicant will be working in an interdisciplinary, integrative research team consisting of researchers from cognitive and information sciences.

Requirements:

• Applicant must hold master’s degree (or equivalent) in a field focused on text-mining, text-analysis or data sciences (e.g., computational linguistics, digital humanities, human-computer interaction, or information science) is required; a PhD in such a field is preferred but not required.
• Experience in applying supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised machine-learning models to support textual analysis for policy analysis is required.
• 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.
• 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.
• Familiarity with finding and accessing natural language datasets.
• Experience with high performance computing as applied to natural language processing and/or analysis of textual data.
• Experience addressing challenges in using natural language datasets, including multilingual data, bias, creation, curation, metadata, disambiguation, etc.
• Applicants should have a profound interest in applying the above-mentioned skills and technologies to policy questions.

Applications:

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 on Machine Tools for Behavioral Science and Evidence-Informed Policy Making” in the email’s subject line. Applicants should submit the following:

• Cover letter describing research interests
• Curriculum Vitae
• One single representative paper (published or working paper) and a URL pointing to a portfolio of previous computational work (e.g., github repositories).