[CogSci] 2 postdoc + 3 PhD positions in Constantin Rothkopf's lab in ERC funded project ACTOR

[Constantin Rothkopf]

Two postdoc and three PhD positions are available in the lab of 
Constantin Rothkopf at the Centre for Cognitive Science @ TU Darmstadt 
as part of the ERC project ACTOR. The goal of this project is to use 
both human behavioral experiments and computational modeling to 
understand human sequential behavior in tasks ranging from continuous 
psychophysics to navigation and food preparation in the framework of 
sequential decision making/planning/optimal control/RL.

To get a better idea about this  project, here some relevant work from 
our group:
- Straub, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2021). Putting perception into action: 
Inverse optimal control for continuous psychophysics. bioRxiv.
https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.12.23.473976
- Schultheis, M., Straub, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2021). Inverse optimal 
control adapted to the noise characteristics of the human sensorimotor 
system. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 34, 9429-9442.
https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/4e55139e019a58e0084f194f758ffdea-Abstract.html
- Neupärtl, N., Tatai, F., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2020). Intuitive physical 
reasoning about objects’ masses transfers to a visuomotor decision task 
consistent with Newtonian physics. PLoS computational biology, 16(10), 
e1007730.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007730
- Hoppe, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2019). Multi-step planning of eye 
movements in visual search. Scientific reports, 9(1), 1-12.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-37536-0
- Hoppe, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2016). Learning rational temporal eye 
movement strategies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 
113(29), 8332-8337.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1601305113

Our group is part of the Centre for Cognitive Science and the AI Center 
at TU Darmstadt, which are home to a large group of PIs and junior 
researchers working in the areas of computational cognitive science, 
machine learning, and artificial intelligence. We are part of several 
research consortia and engage in many fruitful research collaborations. 
The lab has state of the art equipment for eye and body tracking, VR, 
naturalistic task monitoring, and psychophysics.

The Frankfurt-Darmstadt metropolitan area is located in the heart of 
Europe and is one of the most international regions in Germany with a 
diverse community and rich culture repeatedly earning high rankings in 
worldwide surveys of quality of living. Frankfurt just recently reached 
7th place worldwide in a ranking by the Economist and Darmstadt has 
repeatedly ranked among the top innovation driving cities in Germany.

While some of the positions are geared towards more empirical work 
others are strongly focused on computational work. Applicants may 
therefore have a background in computer science, cognitive science, 
neuroscience, psychology, engineering, or related fields. Don’t hesitate 
to contact me for more details. Please send a CV, a two page summary of 
your past research experience and current research interests, and 
contact information for 2-3 references in a single pdf file. The 
positions can be filled starting in October. Applications will be 
reviewed on a continuing basis.

All the best,
Constantin Rothkopf

https://www.pip.tu-darmstadt.de/
http://www.cogsci.tu-darmstadt.de/
https://hessian.ai/