UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
RESEARCH FELLOW - COGNITIVE ROBOTICS PROJECT

Applications are invited for a Research Fellow to work on the EU-funded
project: CogX: Cognitive Systems that Self-Understand and Self-Extend.
The post is available from 1st April 2009 onwards and is for the
lifetime of the project, which ends on 30th June 2012.

The post will be concerned with the integration of reasoning,
introspection and motivation systems into a complex intelligent robot.
The person appointed to this post will work on new methods for
representing and reasoning about a system’s knowledge and capabilities,
and use these new approaches to build an architectural framework for
managing an intelligent system’s goals and motivations. The work will
have a strong practical element, with the post holder required to play a
lead role in the theoretical and practical integration of project-wide
results (including vision, language, navigation and planning systems)
into a robotic demonstrator system, using the developed architectural
framework. You will have a strong background in AI planning, reasoning,
architectures for intelligent systems, sequential decision making or
middleware for intelligent systems.

The post holder will work in a team of six researchers within the
Intelligent Robotics Lab at Birmingham, and along with partner groups at
five other universities. Information on the CogX project is available at
http://cogx.eu.

The Intelligent Robotics Lab (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/go/irlab) is a
growing centre for research in robotics, cognition and machine learning
in the UK. We collaborate with engineers, psychologists and biologists
to develop new ideas and techniques. The group currently has 17 members,
including 4 faculty, 4 postdoctoral researchers and 9 doctoral students,
and holds over £1.6m in external research funding. As part of your
duties you will also be encouraged to contribute to grant writing, and
setting the research agenda for the future work of the group. Strong
communication and management skills are therefore essential.

The ideal candidate must hold a PhD in Computer Science, AI, Cognitive
Science, Engineering or a related subject, OR possess equivalent
research experience, including, if possible, robotics research
experience and linux expertise. Excellent programming skills, in C/C++
or Java, together with the ability to engineer software to very high
standards of reliability, are also required.


Informal enquiries (preferably by email) to any of:

     Dr Nick Hawes
         email: N.A.Hawes@cs.bham.ac.uk
         tel.: +44 121 415 8279
         http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~nah/

     Dr Jeremy Wyatt
         email: J.L.Wyatt@cs.bham.ac.uk
         tel.: +44 121 414 4788,
         http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jlw/

     Dr Richard Dearden
         email: R.W.Dearden@cs.bham.ac.uk
         tel.:+44 121 414 6687
         http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~rwd/

     Prof Aaron Sloman
         email: A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk
         tel.: +44 121 414 4775
         http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/


Starting salary of up to £38,757 a year, in the range of £36,532 to
£43,622 a year (potential progression on performance once in post to
£49,096).

Closing date: 6th February 2009. Late applications will be considered if
the appointments process has not gone too far.
   					
Reference: 43285

For more details see, including the application procedure, see:
http://snipurl.com/cogx-rf-09-1