The University of Oulu is an international scientific community, with approximately 15 000 students and 3 000 employees. The strengths of the University are wide multidisciplinary study and research interests, modern research and study environment and extensive cooperation with international educational and research institutes.

The Faculty of Science at the University of Oulu is announcing an open postdoctoral position, which will be located at the Research Unit of Mathematical Sciences (http://www.oulu.fi/mathematics/) which has an internationally strong position at the forefront of research in its focus areas. The Research Unit is a partner in Finnish Centre of Excellence in Inverse Modelling and Imaging (https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/centre-of-excellence-of-inverse-modelling-and-imaging). The appointee will work in close collaboration with the Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis (CMVS), the Center for Ubiquitous Computing (UBICOMP) and the Biomimetics and Intelligent Systems Group (BISG) at the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (http://www.oulu.fi/itee). The Faculty is internationally attractive, with numerous visiting scholars and extensive international collaboration networks. The Research Units (https://www.oulu.fi/itee/units), including CMVS, UBICOMP and BISG with their leading experts are responsible for undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral education.

This position is aimed at strengthening the participating research units as well as the Data Insight for High-Dimensional Dynamics (HiDyn, https://www.oulu.fi/university/hidyn) program funded by the Academy of Finland PROFI5. HiDyn is a program devoted to multidisciplinary data science and artificial intelligence. It will offer mathematical and methodological expertise to understand high-dimensional dynamic systems.

The postdoctoral position is for 3 years and is aimed to start on August 2020 or as soon as possible thereafter.

Description of the position

You will be working for the research project Enhancing transparency and understandability of artificial intelligence methods. The research is aiming to develop methods that facilitate measuring the uncertainty in the predictions and enhancing the understandability and interpretability of AI methods.

The new Postdoc researcher is expected to continually write and publish scientific articles in international peer-reviewed journals documenting the achievements of the work. Some participation in teaching is required.

The work will be supervised by the collaborative research group (Susanna Pirttikangas, Satu Tamminen, Matteo Pedone, Xiaobai Li, Leena Ruha and Mikko Sillanpää).

Requirements

A Ph.D. (or equivalent) in Computational or Applied Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science and Engineering or another field relevant to the position.

The candidate is expected to have computational orientation and knowledge in at least one of the related fields of the project. This includes temporal modelling, state-space models, uncertainty propagation, stochastic processes, deep learning, ensemble methods, regression forests, Bayesian statistics and other artificial intelligence and machine learning methods. Experience with machine vision, and model explainer techniques like LIME and SHAP are considered as an advantage.

Special emphasis will be given to research expertise within the subject field, demonstrated by an international publications record. Some post-doctoral experience is of advantage, but the applicant should have attained a Ph.D. no more than ten years before the end of the application period. Experience on multidisciplinary research, work abroad and other international experience will be regarded as an asset.

Employent and Salary

The salary of a Postdoc will be based on levels 5 – 6, of the requirement level chart for teaching and research personnel in the salary system of Finnish universities. In addition to the basic salary, the appointee will be paid a salary component based on personal work performance with a maximum of 50% of the basic salary. The full salary is approximately 3,400 – 4,300 euros per month. The annual working time is 1624 hours.

A trial period of six months is applied in the position.

How to apply

Applications must be accompanied by the following English-language documents:

1) Brief curriculum vitae (Max. size limit of the attachment: 5 Mbytes and 4 pages).

2) List of publications where the peer reviewed publications are clearly indicated.

3) Brief motivation letter summarizing applicant’s professional experience and expertise and describing why applicant is interested in about this position. Also information on personal research interests and career plans are valuable to provide here (max 2 pages).

4) Full name and e-mail addresses for at least two persons who are willing to give reference letters (if separately asked).

Applications, together with all relevant enclosures, should be submitted using the electronic application form by 15^th of August 2020.

Contact

   Professor Mikko Sillanpää, mikko.sillanpaa (at) oulu.fi, puh. 040-6734474

About the City of Oulu

The City of Oulu is Northern Finland’s largest and oldest city, with a population of over 200,000. Located in the Gulf of Bothnia in the Oulu River delta, the city has good access from anywhere. Oulu is a very safe and family friendly community with one of the highest qualities of life in all of Nordic countries. As the world’s northernmost  tech hub, Oulu has a highly educated and innovative workforce and the University has a strong role in the community.

EDITED 7 JULY: Application time extended