Fabio Ruini's blog » Università

UoP – Lecturer in Humanoid Robotics and Intelligent Systems

Fabio Ruini — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:15:16 +0000

Non so bene per quale ragione, presumo collegata a strane congiunzioni astrali, pare che tutti gli annunci di lavoro piu’ interessanti tendano sempre ad arrivare piu’ o meno in contemporanea tra loro. Oggi apro la mia mailbox e cosa mi trovo? Il bando per un posto da lecturer in Humanoid Robotics and Intelligent Systems. Dove? Ma proprio in quel di Plymouth. Non credo di avere i requisiti per la posizione in oggetto (o, meglio, ne sono ragionevolmente sicuro) quindi faccio opera buona e condivido il bando con tutti i voi. In bocca al lupo nel caso decideste di tentare l’avventura.

University of Plymouth
School of Computing and Mathematics

Ref: A1849
Lecturer in Humanoid Robotics and Intelligent Systems
Salary £30747 to £43840 pa – Grade 7/8

The School of Computing and Mathematics wishes to appoint a Lecturer in Humanoid Robotics and Intelligent Systems to contribute to research and teaching in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. You will focus on developing lecture and support material using our new bipedal robot and industrial manipulators. This will include some programme coding for closed-loop control of bipedal gait. In addition you will assist in developing a robotics outreach programme for schools.

The School has a strong interdisciplinary focus on robotics and intelligent systems, computer networks and security, digital art and technology, communications and electronics. Research in Computer Science at the University of Plymouth was rated 5 at the last Research Assessment Exercise.

You must hold a PhD or equivalent in a Computing/Robotics discipline, or have recently submitted your thesis, and have a track record of research expertise in the area of humanoid robotics and intelligent systems. Ideally, you must also have some experience in control engineering for robotics.

Recruitment and selection will be based on individual merit; however, we particularly encourage applications from women, black and minority ethnic people who are under-represented in the Faculty of Science and Technology.

More on research within the School of Computing and Mathematics may be found on:
http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/schools/compmath.

This is a full-time position working 37 hours per week on a fixed-term basis for 3 years in the first instance, but may be extended beyond this period subject to funding.

For an informal discussion, please contact Dr. Guido Bugmann by email on gbugmann@plymouth.ac.uk, although applications must be made in accordance with the details shown.

Closing date: 12 noon, Friday 27 August 2010

UZH – ai lab – Postdoctoral researcher position opening

Fabio Ruini — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:21:40 +0000

Spunta fuori una nuova posizione per aspiranti post-doc. Arriva questa volta dall’ai lab di Rolf Pfeifer, presso l’Universita’ di Zurigo. La posizione e’ relativa al Locomorph project del quale avevo gia’ parlato in questo post. Il ruolo non e’ solo di ricerca pura, ma prevede anche una forte componente “manageriale”. Per chi fosse interessato, qui sotto trovate copia dello scarno comunicato ufficiale originariamente pubblicato a questo indirizzo.

A postdoctoral researcher position is available at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Zurich.
The successful candidate will join a team in investigating and developing legged robots for efficient and robust locomotion in unknown terrains, within the framework of the Locomorph project, funded by the EU. More information about the project is available in www.locomorph.eu.

Qualifications:

PhD in a robotic-related field (engineering, computer science, etc)

Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written English

Experience in legged robotic research is a plus

The position is open immediately. Review of applications will begin as applications are received and continue until the position is filled.

Application package:

Please send the following by email in a single PDF file to ravlija@ifi.uzh.ch. Please put “Locomorph Postdoc Application” on the Subject line.

CV with a list of at least 3 references

Dissertation title and abstract

A one-page summary of research background and interests

Available start date

Two papers which can be either published, accepted for publication, or in-preparation which demonstrate some of the expected qualifications above

Contact Information:
Prof. Rolf Pfeifer
c/o Sladjana Ravlija
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Andreasstrasse 15
8050 Zurich
Switzerland
Email: ravlija@ifi.uzh.ch
Phone: +41 44 635 24 07

Locomorph project

Fabio Ruini — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:40:03 +0000

Grazie ad una chiacchierata inaspettata avvenuta oggi pomeriggio con Lijin Aryananda sono venuto a conoscenza del progetto Locomorph, coordinato dalla University of Zurich ed a cui partecipano anche EPFL, Friedrich-Schiller University of Jean, University of Southern Denmark, Antwerpen e Ryerson. Trattasi di un progetto decisamente interessante, focalizzato sulla locomozione robotica all’interno di ambienti sconosciuti. Da un punto di vista scientifico, il vero punto di forza consiste nello studio della morfologia necessaria per muoversi in ambienti particolari, e soprattutto sulla “morphosis”, ovvero il cambiamento della morfologia, volontario per rispondere ad esigenze particolari di locomozione oppure obbligato perche’ indotto da cause di forza maggiore.

Qui di seguito potete comunque leggere la descrizione del progetto, piu’ approfondita rispetto alle due righe da me redatte, presente sul sito ufficiale linkato in apertura di post.

Project Description

Locomorph’s goal is to push beyond the state of the art in robotic locomotion and movements, by increasing efficiency, robustness, and thus usability in unknown environments. As robotic research and industry are competing to increase robots’ usability towards the highly-in-demand service robotics, advancements in robotic locomotion today would give Europe a significant competitive advantage. Locomorph combines multidisciplinary approaches from biology, biomechanics, neuroscience, robotics, and embodied intelligence to investigate locomotion and movements in animals and robots, focusing on two concepts: morphology and morphosis.

Morphology

The first concept, morphology, is based on the observation that successful biomimetic designs rely on effective embodiment: on clever morphology and use of material properties. Because of the ingenious forms, materials, and mechanisms selected by nature, animals can move efficiently and stably through virtually every conceivable terrain. When the animals’ bodies undergo changes, either due to natural growth process or more extreme injuries such as limb loss, they gradually adapt and even ‘invent’ new ways of walking.

In this project, we will explore various morphological factors (shape, materials, sensors, compliance, limb segmentation, etc) to generate novel and optimal robotic designs for efficient and robust locomotion in unknown environments, based on insights from biological and biomechanical studies. We will iteratively build many diverse robots and co-develop control strategies while observing the robots in different environments in order exploit the complex dynamic which emerge from the interaction with the environment.

In order to support this morphology exploration, we will develop an infrastructure for enabling fast construction of robots with varying morphology, using a wide range of modular heterogeneous robotic components, such as legs and trunk/torso components with different shapes and materials, elastic elements, sensors, actuators with varying compliance, etc. This infrastructure will provide sharing of modular components (hardware and software) which enable fast construction of robots and an extensive collaboration among the consortium.

Morphosis

The second concept, morphosis, extends the concept of exploiting morphology further by investigating morphing, i.e. changing morphology. Voluntary morphosis – the ability to self-adjust own morphology – is a valuable skill for robots, as it can increase their adaptivity to current tasks and environments. Involuntary morphing is also a relevant issue, since it can occur in robots because of injuries or other external causes.

We will explore this topic using two complementary approaches. Firstly, we will conduct animal/human experiments to study biological strategies in dealing with voluntary/involuntary morphosis. In nature, morphosis occurs at various time scales.

Very slow morphosis occurs during the natural selection process, where new morphology is adapted from an ancestral body plan due to new environmental constraints. For example, the Takydromus sexlineatus, a species of the lacertid lizard family, has a very slender elongated body and reduced limbs ideal for ‘grass swimming’, while the Meroles anchietae has long hind limbs, long slender toes, and a short stiff trunk ideal for fast running. However, perhaps this morphology is also used in a different way because the Meroles anchietae is also good in sand swimming in the desert. Morphosis also occurs within each animal’s lifetime due to ontogenetic growth. Abnormal morphosis can also occur due to injuries, such as limb loss. Lastly, some animals sometimes perform an active form of morphosis, for example primates switch from quadrupedal to tri- or bi-pedal locomotion when holding an object.

Secondly, we will extract insights from the results to investigate how to construct robots which can voluntarily morph (self-adjust their own morphology) during runtime to adapt to current task demands and environments, for example by lengthening and contracting their limbs, altering their overall shape by trunk/torso actuation, etc (see figure below for conceptual drawing of robotic voluntary morphosis). We will also develop motor control strategies for dealing with morphosis, both voluntary and involuntary. This, combined with the robot’s modularity, will create highly robust robots, able to deal with body changes e.g. limb loss.

Through an exploration of these two concepts we aim to develop robots with increased maneuverability, self-stabilization, energy efficiency, and adaptivity to unknown environments. These advances will bring us closer to service robotics, as a large part of these robots must able to locomote safely, regardless of surfaces, layouts, or terrains.

Un elenco delle pubblicazioni prodotte fino a questo momento potete trovarlo a questo link (purtroppo non sono scaricabili da questa pagina, quindi nel caso foste interessati dovreste procedere in maniera alternativa). In chiusura, invece, vi lascio con un po’ di immagini dei robot che sono stati costruiti durante il progetto. Ovviamente grezzi (sono piu’ prototipi che non prodotti finiti), ma comunque simpatici anche da vedere.

Chemistry lab rules for dummies

Fabio Ruini — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:54:00 +0000

Non so se per caso ci siano PhD e/o aspiranti post-doc in chimica che seguono le pagine di questo blog. Nel caso, penso sia utile renderli partecipi di questa meravigliosa lettera che ho trovato nei meandri piu’ reconditi della rete. Si tratta di una (presunta) missiva inviata dal professor Erick M. Carreira, all’epoca faculty al Caltech, ad uno dei suoi post-doc, al secolo Guido Koch. Reo, quest’ultimo, di non presentarsi sempre in laboratorio la sera e durante i weekend.

The best scientific paper ever written

Fabio Ruini — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:59:39 +0000

Non so se si tratti di un hoax o meno, ma sicuramente e’ esilarante. Mi e’ appena arrivato via email il link ad un articolo dal titolo The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block”, (non) scritto da tale Dennis Upper nel 1974 ed apparentemente pubblicato sul Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (J Appl Behav Anal. 1974 Fall; 7(3): 497). Qui sotto potete vederlo in versione integrale, mentre il PDF e’ scaricabile cliccando qui.

Ovviamente, l’articolo in questione non poteva non essere stato citato. Come ad esempio, in questo successivo lavoro, tra i cui autori non poteva non figurare un italiano.

[PhD and Postdoc positions] Intrinsically motivated RL, Developmental robotics, ICub

Fabio Ruini — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 11:55:06 +0000

Mentre il sottoscritto e’ ancora in attesa di notizie provenienti dall’ESA per quanto riguarda il suo futuro, il mio sempre vigile e attento supervisor mi gira questa mattina un’email con la quale si pubblicizzano un po’ di posizioni (PhD e PostDoc) da essere ricoperte a partire da inizio 2011. Tutte queste posizioni sono in Francia, tre a Parigi ed una Bordeaux. Temi di fondo: developmental robotics, machine learning e computer vision. E la piattaforma robotica di riferimento e’ il “nostro” iCub. Nel caso in cui qualcuno di voi fosse interessato, qui di seguito trovate l’annuncio.

Dear all,

In the context of a 3 years project funded by the french research agency ANR, we are looking for highly skilled and motivated candidates for a PhD or a Postdoc in the fields of developmental robotics, machine learning and computer vision with evaluation on the iCub humanoid robot.

The global project aims at addressing 4 complementary challenges that have been identified as crucial to the development of future humanoid robotics:

* CHALLENGE 1: How can a robot learn efficient perceptual representations of its body and of external objects given initially only low-level perceptual capabilities?
* CHALLENGE 2: How can a robot learn motor representations and use them to build basic affordant reaching and manipulation skills?
* CHALLENGE 3: What guidance heuristics, based on intrinsic motivation, active learning and social guidance, should be used to explore vast sensorimotor spaces in unknown changing bodies and environments?
* CHALLENGE 4: How can mechanisms for building efficient representations/abstractions, mechanisms for learning manipulation skills, and guidance mechanisms be integrated in the same experimental robotic architecture and reused for different robots?

These 4 interrelated challenges are distributed over four partners:

ENSTA-ParisTech (Paris) will lead challenge 1. The contact is David Filliat (david.filliat@ensta.fr).
See http://cogrob.ensta.fr/

ISIR-UPMC-Paris 6 (Paris) will lead challenge 2. ISIR hosts the iCub humanoid robot on which the acheivements will be evaluated. The contacts are Olivier Sigaud and Vincent Padois (olivier.sigaud@upmc.fr). See http://www.isir.fr/

INRIA (FLOWERS team, Bordeaux) will lead Challenge 3. The contact is Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (pierre-yves.oudeyer@inria.fr).
See http://flowers.inria.fr/ and http://www.pyoudeyer.com (for this partner, postdoc applications will be preferred)

The GOSTAI company (Paris) will lead Challenge 4. The contact is Jean-Christophe Baillie (baillie@gostai.com).
See http://www.gostai.com/

The funding should be available by January 2011 or earlier. Specific schedules might be considered for specific candidates. Salaries will depend on the candidate experience and on the partner.

The applicants should send a detailed CV and statement of motivation to the partner that is most relevant given their motivation. The topics being closely related, all candidates will be considered by all partners. Applicants should have strong competences on one or more of the following topics: developmental robotics, motor control, statistical inference, reinforcement learning, optimization, computer vision.

Detailed information about this project will be provided on request.

Tons of scientific books (for free) from IN-TECH

Fabio Ruini — Wed, 19 May 2010 20:49:54 +0000

C’e’ il periodo dei matrimoni. Ed in questo ormai ci siamo in mezzo. E poi, a quanto pare, c’e’ il tempo dei book chapters. Pare ci siamo in mezzo pure a questo. Nella mia mailbox, questa mattina, e’ infatti arrivato un invito da parte della IN-TECH per scrivere un contributo per un libro di prossima uscita dal titolo, molto semplice ed esplicito, “Multi-Agent Systems”. Peccato che i lor signori, oltre ad un contributo scritto, ne volessero pure uno economico. Non una cifra importante, ma comunque sufficiente, unita agli altri impegni del periodo, per farmi desistere dall’impresa.

Ad ogni modo questa della IN-TECH, una realta’ che non conoscevo, e’ stata una scoperta interessante. La casa editrice in questione pubblica quattro journals scientifici, al secolo International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, International Journal of Cyber-Physical Systems, International Journal of Humanoids (in merito a questo, una singola uscita e datata 2009) e International Journal of Engineering Business Management. In aggiunta a questi si e’ prodigata nella pubblicazione anche di diversi (ben 93) libri. Tra i piu’ rilevanti in relazione ai campi di cui mi occupo segnalo Aerial Vehicles (2009), Frontiers in Evolutionary Robotics (2008), Advances in Robotics, Automation and Control (2008), Frontiers in Adaptive Control (2009), Brain, Vision and AI (2008), Advances in Evolutionary Algorithms (2008), Automation and Robotics (2008), Advances in Human Computer Interaction (2008), Cutting Edge Robotics (2005) ed Advances in Service Robotics (2008).

Cosa estremamente interessante e’ che la casa editrice abbraccia in pieno la filosofia Open Access (e questo spiega il perche’ chiedano agli autori un auto-finanziamento per la pubblicazione delle versioni cartacee dei libri pubblicati). Il che sta a significare che tutte le issue dei giornali sopra riportati, nonche’ tutti i libri che ho menzionato, sono liberamente scaricabili dal web in comodo formato PDF. Direi che ce n’e’ abbastanza da riempire un iPad…

Lavorare all’ESA? Why not?

Fabio Ruini — Sun, 16 May 2010 19:05:31 +0000

Considerato il fatto che in quel di Roteglia vi e’ tutt’ora un considerevole numero di persone convinte che il sottoscritto lavori alla NASA (il come una cosa del genere possa essere venuta fuori potrebbe essere interessante oggetto di studio), decisamente non potevo lasciarmi scappare un’occasione del genere. All’ESA, e per la precisione all’interno dell’Advanced Concepts Team, sono state di recente pubblicizzate delle vacancies per Research Fellows (alias, post-docs) in quattro campi differenti: Innovation Dynamics & Computational Economics, Fundamental Physics, Artificial Intelligence e Plasma Physics & Advanced Propulsion. Nonostante il mio background, quantomeno atipico, mi avrebbe probabilmente permesso di candidarmi anche per la prima di queste categorie (e la tentazione c’era… d’altronde, con una laurea in Economia e Gestione delle Reti e dell’Innovazione, quando mai mi ricapitera’ di trovare una posizione con un nome cosi’ somigliante al mio titolo?), ho deciso piu’ coscientemente di concentrarmi su Artificial Intelligence.

Preparare la domanda non e’ stata per niente una cosa semplice e non esagero se dico che mi ha portato via diversi giorni. Un form infinito da compilare ed all’interno del quale vi era da scrivere a ruota libera, il curriculum da aggiornare (come faccia ad essere sempre e comunque outdated e’ qualcosa che va oltre la mia comprensione), anime pie (3) pronte a spedire (in tempo utile) lettere di referenze spacciandomi come una brava persona ed una cover letter che, devo ammettere, e’ l’unica cosa che penso di aver scritto molto bene (Dio benedica chi ha inventato questo sito). Non sono particolarmente soddisfatto del risultato finale, ma siccome la deadline e’ domani e non posso comunque spendere settimane intere nel preparare una singola application, direi che ormai e’ andata. A partire da martedi’ si rimane in attesa e con le dita incrociate. Anche se in maniera un po’ atipica, le ricerche che stanno portando avanti all’ACT sono molto interessanti e, soprattutto, matchano alla perfezione con la mia expertise. Sembra proprio che il posto sia ritagliato su misura. Un posto che inoltre, anche se di soli due anni, a curriculum farebbe un figurone. Insomma, speriamo la cosa possa andare in porto perche’ gli aspetti positivi sarebbero davvero molteplici.

Ora che vi ho aggiornati su come e’ trascorsa quest’altra giornata che alcuni dicono dovrebbe essere festiva, direi che posso finalmente lasciarvi. Dopo una settimana esatta trascorsa dall’ultima volta in cui il mio viso e’ entrato in contatto con una lametta, credo sia finalmente giunto il momento di sbarbarmi…

AFFINE 2010 (3rd International Workshop on Affective Interaction in Natural Environments) ed un paio di vacancies

Fabio Ruini — Wed, 05 May 2010 12:59:38 +0000

Post di servizio, quello di oggi. Rigiro in fatti la call for papers di un workshop, dal titolo Affective Interaction in Natural Environments (interessante per chi si occupa di HRI) che si terra’ il prossimo ottobre a Firenze. In aggiunta a questo, segnalo inoltre due vacancies dedicata a Post-Docs, rispettivamente per esperti di robotica alla Aberystwyth University e di stampo piu’ prettamente neuroscientifico al Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI-CBS) di Leibzig.

AFFINE 2010: 3rd International Workshop on
Affective Interaction in Natural Environments
at ACM Multimedia 2010
Friday 29th October 2010, Firenze, Italy
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/conference/affine2010

Background

A vital requirement for social robots, virtual agents, and human-centered multimedia interfaces is the ability to infer the affective and mental states of humans and provide appropriate, timely output during sustained social interactions. Examples include ensuring that the user is interested in maintaining the interaction or providing suitable empathic responses through the display of facial expressions, gestures, or generation of speech.

This workshop will cover real-time computational techniques for the recognition and interpretation of human multimodal verbal and non-verbal behaviour, models of mentalising and empathising for interaction, and multimedia techniques for synthesis of believable social behaviour supporting human-agent and human-robot interaction.

A key aim of the workshop is the identification and investigation of important open issues in real-time, affect-aware applications ‘in the wild’ and especially in embodied interaction, i.e. with robots and embodied conversational agents. Issues such as natural and multimodal interaction, estimation and adaption to context, context dependent processing and related databases, HCI/HRI beyond emotion (cognition, behaviour, etc.), and best practices for applications in real environments will be discussed in the context of interacting with other humans and social artefacts.

We welcome the participation of researchers from diverse fields, including signal processing and pattern recognition, machine learning, cognition, affective science, human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, and robotics. We hope an interdisciplinary group will benefit from mutual osmosis of ideas, concepts and developments in the field.

The workshop especially welcomes studies that provide new insights into the use of multimodal and multimedia techniques for enabling interaction between humans, robots, and virtual agents in naturalistic settings. We also encourage the submission of work-in-progress papers including recent results providing novel and exciting contributions.

Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library. A journal special issue is currently being planned. (Details forthcoming).

Topics

Workshop topics may include, but are not limited to:

Multimedia expression generation in robots and virtual agents, including:

Gaze
Gestures
Facial Expressions
Speech
Other modalities

Multimodal human affect and social behaviour recognition, including:

Facial expressions
Body language
Speech
Physiological
Other modalities

Perception-action loops in agents/robots
Cognitive and affective ‘mentalising’
Visual attention / user engagement with robots and embodied conversational agents (ECAs)
Emotion and cognitive state representation
Social context awareness and adaptation
Natural Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) / Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Multimedia HCI
Multimodal and emotional corpora (naturally evoked or induced emotion)
Recognition of human behaviour for implicit tagging
Contributions to standards for multimodal interaction and specification of mark-up languages
Applications to interactive games, robots and virtual agents

About AFFINE

This workshop follows the previous successful AFFINE workshops organised as satellite events of ICMI ‘08 and ICMI-MLMI ‘09, as well as a special session organised at WIAMIS ‘09. This is the first time the workshop has been held at ACM Multimedia. AFFINE has a track record for attracting researchers from the virtual agents, social robotics and affective computing communities and encourages interdisciplinarity – submissions from other domains are also very welcome.

Important Dates

Deadline for paper submission: 10 June 2010
Notification of acceptance: 10 July 2010
Camera ready paper: 20 July 2010

Submission Instructions

Please prepare your paper in accordance with the ACM Multimedia Guidelines. Your paper may be either 4 or 6 pages in length, including references and figures.

Authors may submit a pdf version of their paper using the ACM Multimedia 2010 paper submission system. Please note: The review process is double-blind, so please be sure to remove any identifying information before uploading your submission (name, affiliation, tell-tale references, etc).

–

Vacancy in Humanoid Robotics Research

Robotics Research Group, Department of Computer Science,
Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK

Applicants are invited to join the team working on developmental robotic learning based on an iCub humanoid robot (http://www.robotcub.org/). This project (known as IM-CLeVeR) is an EC FP 7 funded project with 7 other partners across Europe: in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA (http://im-clever.noze.it/). There are three iCub humanoid robots purchased for the project and these will be based in Italy, Switzerland and Aberystwyth.

Candidates should have good programming and software engineering skills, a strong interest in robotics research, and good analytical and communication skills. Experience of hardware systems will be an advantage as the work includes the programming and support of the iCub robot. Salary scale: £25,001 – £29,853. Fixed term 3 years

The Computer Science Department at Aberystwyth is a very successful department, being rated top in Wales in both teaching and research, and provides an attractive and lively working environment (http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/cs/). In the recent government research assessment exercise (RAE) our research quality was assessed as being the best in Wales and within the top band of Computer Science departments in the UK (2.95).

For informal enquiries contact: Prof. Mark Lee, email: mhl@aber.ac.uk, phone: +44 (0)1970 622420 (direct).

For further particulars and application forms see: http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/hr/jobs/vacancies-external/

Ref: CS.10.06
The closing date for applications is 12th May 2010. We wish to fill the post as soon as possible.

–

[D-multisensory] Post-doc position, Max Planck Leipzig, Germany

We are seeking a Postdoctoral Researcher to work in the group ‘Neural mechanisms of human communication’ (lead by Katharina von Kriegstein) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI-CBS), in Leipzig, Germany.

The goal of the group is to investigate neural mechanisms of person perception and speech recognition by using several methods of systems neuroscience (fMRI, sMRI, EEG, MEG, TMS, tDCS). Experiments involve healthy controls, as well as subjects with selective deficits (i.e. phonagnosia, prosopagnosia, dyslexia, asperger). An additional emphasis is placed on linking the experimental work to computational models of dynamic perception and action.

The research is conducted at the MPI-CBS in Leipzig, Germany, an internationally leading centre for cognitive and imaging neuroscience equipped with a 7.0 T MRI scanner, two 3.0 T MRI scanners, a 306 channels MEG system, TMS, tDCS and several EEG systems. All facilities and data analysis are supported by experienced IT and physics staff.

The candidate must have a PhD (or equivalent) in neuroscience, medicine, psychology or a related field and should be able to demonstrate a consistently outstanding academic record including publications. The candidate is expected to be a talented, innovative and enthusiastic researcher with an interest in working on projects within the general framework of the group. The ideal candidate will have expertise in the acquisition and analysis of neuroscientific data. Applicants with no neuroscientific experience but with a strong background in psychophysics or behavioural genetics are also encouraged to apply.

Starting date for the position is flexible. Salary is dependent on experience and based on MPI stipends or equivalent salary according to German public service regulations. The position is initially for two years with possible extension.

Candidates are encouraged to apply at their earliest convenience.
Applications with the subject heading ‘HC10’ should be sent via email to: communication@cbs.mpg.de.

The following documents should be included in the application in one PDF-file:

curriculum vitae
contact details of two personal references
a description of personal qualifications and future research interests.

The MPI-CBS is an equal opportunity employer, committed to the advancement of individuals without regard to ethnicity, religion, gender, or disability.

Contact for informal enquiries about the post:

Dr. Katharina von Kriegstein (kriegstein@cbs.mpg.de)
Max-Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Stephanstrasse 1A
04103 Leipzig, Germany
http://www.cbs.mpg.de/groups/misc/humcomm

Miracolo a Losanna

Fabio Ruini — Mon, 03 May 2010 14:49:13 +0000

Ebbene si’. Dopo oltre un mese di estenuanti ricerche che mi stavano portando sull’orlo della depressione, con un colpo di scena dell’ultimo minuto (quando ormai ero rassegnato a salire in Svizzera la settimana prossima, sistemarmi in un B&B e proseguire le ricerche direttamente sul luogo) ho finalmente trovato quello che sara’ il mio alloggio per i prossimi mesi. La scelta, che in realta’ scelta non si puo’ definire data la mancanza assoluta di alternative, e’ ricaduta su un alloggio studentesco. Camera ensuite, quindi con servizi privati, in un piano con cucina e living room in comune con gli altri inquilini. La zona “lavaggio panni” e’ invece in un locale esterno, con lavatrici (e, presumo, asciugatrici) a gettone. Una sorta di salto nel passato, insomma, come quando sbarcai per la prima volta a Plymouth (nell’ormai “lontano” 2007) e mi parcheggiai per un paio di mesi al Robbins.

Il prezzo e’ decisamente ragionevole (CHF 507 al mese e 700 di deposito anticipato) e, sebbene a pagamento (CHF 60 al mese, piu’ 200 di cauzione per la chiave d’accesso), avro’ anche il lusso di avere a disposizione un posto auto. Il fabbricato e’ gestito dalla FMEL, Fondation maison pour étudiants de l’UNIL et de l’EPFL e la camera, l’unica disponibile, e’ saltata fuori grazie alla rinuncia last-minute di una precedente prenotazione.

I piu’ curiosi sappiano che la camera in questione si trova al Cedres, il quale, stando a Google Maps, dista 5.9 km di distanza dall’EPFL. E se una distanza del genere, a Plymouth, mi avrebbe messo in difficolta’, ora che avro’ con me la mia macchinina non sono invece minimamente toccato dalla cosa. E gia’, anzi, mi pregusto il fatto di poter portare con me chili e chili di vestiti, libri, cibarie ed attrezzature varie, senza dover pagare con il sangue Sua Maesta’ Mr. O’Leary.

Ora si tratta solo di capire quando partire. Al momento il ballottaggio e’ tra domenica e lunedi’. Ad ogni modo la nuova avventura partira’ a breve.