Researcher Positions in Developmental Psychology (100% Postdoc)/Computer Science (100% Pre/Postdoc)

We are happy to announce that the DFG funded project Learning From Environment Through the Eyes of Children within SPP 2431 New Data Spaces for the Social Sciences, situated at Goethe University Frankfurt, invites applications for 

1 PostDoc position in Psychology (f/m/d, 100% E 13 TV-G-U) and
1 PhD or PostDoc position in Computer Science (f/m/d, 100% E 13 TV-G-U) 

Preferred starting date is September 2024. The duration of contracts will be three years. The salary grade is based on the job characteristics of the collective agreement applicable to Goethe University (TV-G-U).

The project is set in an interdisciplinary environment with Prof. Yee Lee Shing from the psychology department from the field of Developmental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, and Prof. Gemma Roig from the computer science department from the field of Artificial Intelligence and Neural Data Science. Our joint research goal for this project is to establish a new mode of data acquisition that captures young children’s first-person experience in naturalistic settings and establish systematic pipelines that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to characterize the nature and complexity of the captured experiences. This contributes to the aims of the SPP programme to establish a new, multimodal data approach in social science studies, as well as a pipeline that connects and compares this new approach against traditional survey data types.

For more information about the SPP 2431 New Data Spaces for the Social Science, please visit https://www.new-data-spaces.de/en-us//. 

Scope and hiring requirements for Psychology position:

The individual will work in close collaboration with computer science team members on the issue of the interplay between environment and individual development, utilizing digital technologies to reliably capture daily experiences from the first-person perspective. The ideal candidate should have a PhD in psychology/cognitive neuroscience, preferably with experience with eye-tracking and/or collecting video data in everyday environments, designing and setting up studies with young children, and analyzing the collected data in relation to psychological variables. For more information, please contact Yee Lee Shing at shing@psych.uni-frankfurt.de.

Scope and hiring requirements for Computer Science position:

This person will work on the development of an AI-based framework to characterize the nature and complexity of the captured experiences, including the development and adaptation of multimodal deep neural networks to automatically analyze and infer the with camera, eye-tracking and microphones; analyze and explore the collected data from the psychological variables and questions. The ideal candidate will have a science degree and should have strong knowledge of machine learning (deep learning, RNN, LSTMs, transformers, multimodal models), excellent programming skills in Python and extensive experience with Tensorflow, pyTorch or related libraries; knowledge of distributed high performance computing with GPUs and experience/strong interest in psychology and cognitive science. For more information, please contact Gemma Roig at roig@cs.uni-frankfurt.de. 

The project is a multidisciplinary project at Goethe University Frankfurt, which is part of a vibrant community of cognitive and neuroscientists, with a strong core of AI. The researchers have access to state-of-the-art research facilities, including laboratory facilities for human behavioral studies and dedicated GPU computing resources.

Goethe University aims to increase the proportion of women and therefore particularly encourages applications from women. Severely disabled persons with equal aptitude and qualifications will be given priority.

Please send your informative application by 07.07.2024 with the usual documents, including an overview of courses already held with evaluation results and a one-page description of the research profile exclusively in electronic form (one PDF file) by e-mail to Prof. Dr. Yee Lee Shing, Institute of Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Theodor-W.- Adorno-Platz 6, 60323 Frankfurt am Main, e-mail: shing@psych.uni-frankfurt.de and Prof. Dr. Gemma Roig, Computer Science and Mathematics, Chair of Data Analytics & Modeling, Robert-Mayer-Straße 11 - 15, 60325 Frankfurt, e-mail: roig@cs.uni-frankfurt.de.