Overview
A postdoctoral research scientist position is available in the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. We are looking for a postdoc researcher with a background in computer science and machine learning, and expertise in reinforcement learning.
The project will be funded by the National Science Foundation and titled Human-Centered Reinforcement Learning for Personalized Nutritional Coaching. It will develop a novel, human-centered reinforcement learning approach to learn dialog structures for health coaching that balance the optimal collection of information with intuitive and human-perceived logical conversational structures.
Responsibilities
- Collaborate with the research team to investigate human-centered and scalable reinforcement learning (RL) solutions to learn conversational structures that align with human expectations.
- Work with a multidisciplinary team to develop a corpus of dialogs to identify human preferences and expectations for optimal dialog structures.
- Develop novel RL architectures and work with a team to develop a chatbot that incorporates this novel RL architecture.
- Address methodological and applied aspects of reinforcement learning, inverse reinforcement learning, and aligning RL with human preferences, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction.
- Engage in mentoring and research activities, including preparation of scientific manuscripts and presenting at conferences and other venues, participating in grant proposal preparation, teaching and mentoring PhD and masters students, and contributing to course development.
- Co-mentored by the co-Principal Investigators, with weekly meetings to discuss goals and progress.
Qualifications Required Qualifications
- Requires a PhD in Computer Science or related fields.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and learning from human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF).
- Background with natural language processing techniques.
- Previous experience with applications of ML in healthcare.
- Previous experience in human-computer interaction.
Additional Requirements
- Must have excellent organization, oral communication, and scientific writing skills.
- Background and expertise in machine learning and reinforcement learning.
- Experience implementing ML and RL algorithms in Python.
How to Apply
Interested and qualified candidates should submit a CV, cover letter, statement describing their research interests, and three letters of references to the Columbia University Academic Careers website. Quick link:
Requisition number: 130484.
Job Details
- Seniority level: Internship
- Employment type: Full-time
- Job function: Other
- Industries: Higher Education
- Requisition number: 130484
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