TU Wien is among the most successful technical universities in Europe and it is Austria’s largest scientific-technical research and educational institution. The Faculty of Informatics, one of the eight faculties at the TU Wien, plays an active role in national and international research and has an excellent reputation. The main areas of research include Computer Engineering, Logic and Computation, Visual Computing & Human-Centered Technology, as well as Information Systems Engineering.
Tasks:
Complexity Science successfully models multiple aspects of society to provide key insights to decision makers. This success arises through understanding data not in isolation but taking the complexity of interdependencies and interconnections into account. Benefits include using insights obtained from the data to improve public services, or to better understand the impacts on society of changes in legislation or of external factors such as natural disasters.
A data modality that is not used to its full potential in Complexity Science is text from multiple potential sources: government (e.g. patents, legislation, court decisions), commercial (e.g. company annual reports), medical (e.g. patient records), scientific (e.g. scientific papers, historical documents), and civil (e.g. social media). Text analysis approaches need to be developed to reliably extract trustworthy information from potentially noisy text as input to models and simulations. As the text data is often analysed for purposes for which it was not originally collected, it is necessary to compensate for potential biases. The candidate is expected to contribute both to methodological work on text analysis approaches as well as to applied work on solutions to real-world problems in an inter-disciplinary setting.
The candidate will work at the interface of Data Science and Complexity Science together with governments and public administrations, and should therefore also pay attention to presenting results in a suitable way for use by decision makers. The Digital Humanism Initiative on ensuring that technology development remains centred on human interests should play a central role in this work (
https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/digital-humanism/).
Candidates should have a background and experience in building prototypes that target a well-defined application area and analyse real-world data.
The following list highlights some potential research topics of a successful candidate:
- Natural Language Processing
- Computational Linguistics
- Text Mining
- Information Extraction
- Information Retrieval
- Experiment design and evaluation
- Network Science
- Privacy-aware analytics
- Data fusion
Furthermore, a successful candidate should have an interest in:
- Human-in-the-loop
- Explainability and interpretability
- Algorithm and data biases
The candidate should have experience in working with industry or public administrations, relevant postdoctoral experience, and a compelling research vision. We are particularly interested in candidates working in areas that will complement our existing expertise and lead to fruitful collaborations with other members of TU Wien Informatics, TU Wien in general, and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna.
Besides research, the duties of an Assistant Professor at TU Wien include graduate and undergraduate teaching (in English and German) as well as contributing to usual management and faculty service tasks.
TU Wien is committed to increasing the proportion of women in particular in leadership positions. Female applicants are explicitly encouraged to apply. Preference will be given to women when equally qualified, unless reasons specific to a male applicant tilt the balance in his favour.
People with special needs are equally encouraged to apply. In case of any questions, please contact the confidant for disabled persons at the university, Mr. Gerhard Neustätter.
The employment starts as University Assistant with a minimum salary of EUR 4,351.90 gross (14 x per year) according to the collective bargaining agreement for a PostDoc. After signing the qualification agreement, the employment continues as Assistant Professor with a minimum salary of EUR 5,124.20 gross (14 x per year).
We look forward to receiving your application until January 04th, 2024.
Applications have to include the following documents:
- A detailed curriculum vitae
- A letter of motivation
- A teaching statement: 2 pages maximum
- A research statement: brief summary of past research activities, as well as a convincing outline of planned research activities, and an explanation of their contribution to the scientific profile of the Faculty of Informatics; 4-6 pages maximum; incl. abstract
- Certificates of doctoral and diploma degrees should be uploaded under the category: +add more documents
- A list of publications and copies of the applicant’s three most important publications related to the position together with an explanation of their relevance should be also uploaded under the category: +add more documents