[visionlist] Postdoc + PhD positions in ERC funded project ACTOR

[Constantin Rothkopf]

The lab of Constantin Rothkopf (https://www.pip.tu-darmstadt.de/) at the 
Centre for Cognitive Science @ TU Darmstadt is looking for PhD and 
Postdoc applicants interested in becoming part of the ERC project ACTOR. 
While some positions are focused on human behavioral experiments others 
are more focused on computational work.

The goal of this project is to use both human behavioral experiments and 
computational modeling to understand human sequential behavior in tasks 
including continuous psychophysics, visual behaviors such as gaze 
selection and blinking, sensorimotor control involving intuitive 
physics, navigation, and food preparation in the framework of sequential 
decision making/planning/optimal control/RL.

Our group is part of the Centre for Cognitive Science and the AI Center 
at TU Darmstadt, which are home to an internationally outstanding 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 multiple fruitful 
research collaborations. The lab has state of the art equipment for eye 
and body tracking, VR, naturalistic task monitoring, psychophysics and 
access to one of the most generous computing infrastructures in Germany. 
We foster an inclusive, supportive, and collaborative environment driven 
by scientific curiosity and mutual respect and we maintain close 
interactions with other research groups including joint lab meetings.

While some of the positions are geared towards more behavioral work 
others are strongly focused on computational modeling. 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 the official application to the dean of the department of 
human sciences dekanat at humanw.tu-darmstadt.de including a CV, a two page 
cover letter explaining your research interests, motivation, and your 
long-term career goals, and contact information for 2-3 references in a 
single pdf file.  The code for the PhD position is “167” and for the 
Postdoc position “168”. Applications will be reviewed on a continuing basis.

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 recently reached 7th 
place worldwide in a ranking of attractiveness by the Economist and 
Darmstadt has repeatedly ranked among the top innovation driving cities 
in Germany.

Finally, to get a better idea about some of our work, here some 
publications by our group:
- Tatai, F., Straub, D., Rothkopf, C. A. (2023). People use Newtonian 
physics in intuitive sensorimotor decisions under risk. In Proceedings 
of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 45, No. 45).
https://escholarship.org/content/qt0rg3z8f6/qt0rg3z8f6_noSplash_c1cad85c077ef907da73774219eb7aed.pdf
- Kadner, F., Willkomm, H., Ibs, I., & Rothkopf, C. (2023). Finding your 
Way Out: Planning Strategies in Human Maze-Solving Behavior. In 
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 
45, No. 45).
https://escholarship.org/content/qt94t1t8kw/qt94t1t8kw_noSplash_3a5e798a923f3583ede08b1f4ccfe488.pdf
- Kessler, F., Frankenstein, J., Rothkopf, C. A. A dynamic Bayesian 
actor model explains endpoint variability in homing tasks, bioRxiv, 2022.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.09.515854v1
- Straub, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2022). Putting perception into action 
with inverse optimal control for continuous psychophysics, eLife 11, e76635.
https://elifesciences.org/articles/76635
   - 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

All the best,
Constantin Rothkopf

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