HAI Postdoctoral Fellow: Cognitively-Inspired AI for Grounded Abstraction Learning, Professor Judith Fan

We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher who will be housed in the Cognitive Tools Lab in the Department of Psychology, advised by Professor Judith Fan. The central goal of our lab is to reverse-engineer humans' ability to rapidly discover and deploy useful abstractions in a variety of real-world settings, from science and engineering to philosophy and law. Our work aims to uncover the fundamental mechanisms that have enabled humans to deploy these cognitive tools in such innovative ways to learn, share knowledge, and create new things.

Project Description

The postdoctoral fellow will lead a project to develop cognitively inspired AI systems that can discover ad hoc abstractions to support natural communication and collaboration with humans. This project will comprise two highly related aims.

The first component of this project will entail developing grounded, joint vision and language-understanding systems with the capacity to learn ad hoc construals of physical scenes that depend on current goals. The second component of this project entails developing AI systems that are capable of coordinating with other agents on shared ad hoc construals to enable successful collaboration on long-horizon physical reasoning challenges. This effort will seek to harness insights from how humans use both natural language and other communication modalities to learn shared representations about entities, actions, and possibilities.

The ideal candidate will be well prepared to lead a deeply interdisciplinary research program, synthesizing approaches from psychology, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, computer vision, and human-computer interaction. In addition, the fellow will be encouraged to participate in cross-disciplinary collaborations between Stanford's AI, Psychology, Vision, Robotics, Natural Language Processing, and Human-Computer Interaction communities.

Mentor Structure

The postdoctoral fellow will be mentored by Professor Judith Fan.

Stanford HAI is also committed to creating a diverse community of scholars who are engaged in contributing to the understanding and advancement of Human-Centered AI. Postdoctoral fellows will have the opportunity to engage with one another and with the broader Stanford HAI research community. They are also expected to participate in professional development, cohort-building, and other programmatic activities organized by HAI.

Qualifications

  • Applicants should have a Ph.D. in cognitive science, psychology, or computer science. Researchers should demonstrate a significant track record working on cognitively-inspired AI or computational cognitive science, and ideally, should have prior experience in natural language processing or working on computational linguistics projects. Past research experience should demonstrate:
    • Technical expertise using a computational toolkit that should include neurosymbolic modeling methods bridging deep neural networks and symbolic modeling approaches. Experience with probabilistic programming and/or research programming languages and program synthesis; and prior research experience in natural language understanding, language modeling, or grounded language and visual reasoning is preferred.
    • Experience running computational-model-driven human cognitive experiments. Experience with experiments designed to evaluate models of human communication and language understanding are preferred.

Evaluation Criteria

Researchers will be selected based on the following considerations:

  • Relevant prior research experience. Interdisciplinarity of research track record should be demonstrated via prior publications in relevant venues in cognitive science, psychology, or computer science.
  • Potential of the individual to add value to and gain benefit from the Stanford HAI community.
  • Record of successfully producing ambitious, interdisciplinary projects independently.

Timeline

  • Application Deadline: March 20, 2024 (Applicants advancing in the review process may be asked to submit additional materials, including letters of recommendation, and may be invited to interview.)
  • Selections will be made by mid-April 2024.
  • This is a 1-year appointment starting Fall 2024.

Apply

For full consideration, send a complete application in a single PDF to HAI-Fellowships@stanford.edu with the subject line: “HAI Postdoc Fellowship - Fan.”

Complete applications will include:

  • Cover letter explaining your interest in becoming a postdoc with the respective research lab/center/faculty through the HAI Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (500 words max).
  • Curriculum Vitae (CV)
  • Short answer responses (300 max each):
    • Description of your dissertation research and broader research agenda
    • How do you see your research training and expertise contributing toward the understanding and advancement of Human-Centered AI? HAI thinks about "Human-Centered AI" through three focus areas.
  • One representative writing sample (published or unpublished)

The expected base pay for this position is $83,600/yr. The pay offered to the selected candidate will be determined based on factors including (but not limited to) the qualifications of the selected candidate, budget availability, and internal equity.

Stanford is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.