Employment Opportunities
Postdoctoral Research Scientist
Job Posting
https://www.dbmi.columbia.edu/postdoctoral-research-scientist-21dec2023/
Department
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Location
Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Position Summary
Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics has an open position for a post-doctoral research fellow with a background in computer science and machine learning, and expertise in reinforcement learning.
The fellow will be joining a project funded by the National Science Foundation titled “Human-Centered Reinforcement Learning for Personalized Nutritional Coaching”. The project will develop a novel approach to human-aligned reinforcement learning to learn dialog structures for health coaching that balance optimal collection of information with intuitiveness and logical conversational structures as perceived by humans.
The post-doctoral research fellow will work in collaboration with the research team to investigate human-centered and scalable reinforcement learning (RL) solutions to learn conversational structures that align with human expectations. This will include working with a multidisciplinary team to develop a corpus of dialogs to identify human preferences and expectations for optimal dialog structures, developing novel RL architectures, and working with a team to develop a chatbot that incorporates this novel RL architecture.
The research will cover methodological and applied aspects of reinforcement learning, inverse reinforcement learning, and aligning RL with human preferences, natural language processing and human-computer interaction.
The postdoctoral fellow will be provided with methodological and applied mentoring, and with plenty of opportunities to advance their research experience. This will include preparation of scientific manuscripts and presenting them at conferences and other scientific venues, participating in grant proposal preparation, teaching and mentoring PhD and Masters students, and preparation of new courses, among others. The fellow will be co-mentored by the co-Principal Investigators (Drs. Urteaga and Mamykina), who will meet weekly to discuss goals and progress.
Minimum Qualifications for Consideration
Requires a PhD in Computer Science or related fields.
Must have excellent organization, oral communication, and scientific writing skills.
The candidate selected for this position is required to undergo a full background check prior to a final offer of employment being made.
Position-Specific Minimum Qualifications for Consideration
The candidate will be required to have the following competencies:
Background and expertise in machine learning and reinforcement learning
Experience implementing ML&RL algorithms in Python
Preferred Qualifications
The project takes inspiration from many diverse intellectual communities, so the candidate will most likely be familiar with only some aspects of the project.
The ideal candidate will have:
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.
Columbia University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer