Researcher for Artificial Intelligence with a focus on decision making and recommender Systems

The "WAVES" research group (http://www.waves.intec.ugent.be/) of the department of Information technology of imec-Ghent University is the expertise center in Belgium for decision making, recommender systems, personalization and information filtering (which are subtopics in the research domain of machine learning).

Current research within the WAVES group is focused around the recent trends emerging in the current online and offline world where users have to cope with an overload of information (blogs, social networks, audio-visual content providers, ...). At the same time, we observe that the presence on the web becomes more personal and online identity and activities gain importance. As a result, assisting and adaptive intelligent software tools and techniques get an increasingly important role in online services. Tools for decision making assistance are emerging to process the vast amounts of data and provide the human decision maker insights into the data to make the optimal decision. One type of tools for decision making assistance is a recommender system. Recommender systems are commonly-used solutions that generate personal suggestions for users based on their preferences, thereby alleviating the problem of information overload.

Function description

The researcher will work within an Inter-University project on artificial intelligence in collaboration with other Flemish Universities. This project will investigate if AI systems can really equal human performance when it comes to complex tasks. AI systems have to be capable of complex reasoning in a way that is autonomous, intelligent and trustworthy. Therefore, we need systems that can integrate and interpret, represent and understand their complex environment in multiple domains, over large timescales and in shared human-machine contexts. A good example of human-machine interaction based on AI is the automatic generation of content recommendations, used by systems such as Amazon and Netflix. The focus of our research group in this project is on this topic of decision making and especially recommender systems.

 The researcher will specialize in the domain of decision making algorithms and recommender systems from a technical viewpoint. More specifically, this job position will thus focus on the topic of AI and machine learning, and its applications for the use cases of decision making, recommender systems, and personalization. The research will exist among other things of:

• Study and design of self-learning algorithms
• User-modeling and data set analysis / processing
• Initiation of experimental set-ups investigating new recommender/personalization techniques

 Profile

We are looking for enthusiastic candidates to perform research in the domains above in the context of projects thereby collaborating with other research groups of Ghent University and other universities, as well as with companies in the private sector. Candidates with a Master degree in Computer engineering, Electrical engineering, and Informatics qualify for this research job.

• Experience in the domain of recommender systems is not necessary but interest in machine learning and data analysis is a definite plus.
• Programming skills (Java or Python) are required.
• Good written and oral English skills are required and knowledge of the Dutch language is a plus.