Cambridge Centre for Research Associate (Fixed Term)
Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence
The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) invites applications for a Postdoctoral Research Associate to work on the project The Major Transitions in the Evolution of Cognition, which spans multiple disciplines including machine learning, cognitive science and philosophy. The appointment will be for two years in the first instance, and is based in Cambridge.
This is a new post within the project, The Major Transitions in the Evolution of Cognition. This is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge (Marta Halina), Macquarie University (Andrew Barron), and The Australian National University (Colin Klein) that was launched in November 2020. This Research Associate will be based at the University of Cambridge, working with Marta Halina and the Animal-AI Testbed team (led by Matthew Crosby) as part of the Kinds of Intelligence programme at CFI.
The successful candidate will be required to adapt theories on major transitions into algorithms or neural network models whose capacities can be tested using the Animal-AI testbed. Animal-AI is a testbed and platform for measuring cognitive skills and can be used to compare human, animal, and AI capabilities. The Major Transitions project will collaborate with ongoing work to improve Animal-AI and the candidate will be expected to propose and facilitate the incorporation of new ideas for the testbed. The candidate should have experience and interest in cognitively inspired deep reinforcement learning or closely related approaches, especially those that have the potential to be applied in 3D environments. It is also important that the candidate can translate ideas between disciplines, taking ideas from computational and comparative neuroscience and philosophy, and implementing them in AI systems.