Tallinn University seeks to hire two Research Fellows in Cultural Data Analytics, particularly in Audiovisual Machine Learning, and Cultural Dynamics, to work on ambitious, high-impact research at the CUDAN ERA Chair project CUDAN.

Tallinn University seeks to hire two Research Fellows in Cultural Data Analytics, particularly in Audiovisual Machine Learning, and Cultural Dynamics, to work on ambitious, high-impact research at the CUDAN ERA Chair project CUDAN.

Start of the employment contract: 01.07.- 01.09.2021, duration of the contract is up to 31.12.2023. Deadline of submitting the application documents is 31st May, 2021.

Successful candidates will join the CUDAN ERA Chair project in Cultural Data Analytics, which is funded by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program with 2.5 million Euro (Grant no. 810961). The selected fellows will complement a highly multidisciplinary research group, currently consisting of 4 faculty, 4 senior fellows, and 5 PhD Students. Current expertise includes art history, algorithmic curation, cultural history, cultural semiotics, computational linguistics, computer science, computational social science, creative industry studies, digital education, evolutionary economics, generative art, machine learning, media innovation, media policy, and network science. Bridging three university schools, the research group collaborates with high-profile academic partners that are spread across the globe, while cooperating with several public and private stakeholders. These include libraries, museums, media institutions, and open data providers. The research group activity forms the core of the CUDAN Open Lab, performing research while simultaneously functioning as a forum for intellectual exchange and meaningful academic mixing. Together, our aim is to systematically deepen our understanding of cultural interaction and dynamics from deep history to the present. We harness a rare high-risk/high-gain opportunity of combining cutting-edge computation, quantification, qualitative inquiry, critical and creative aesthetics, in close collaboration and co-authorship. Our core mission is to produce and publish exemplary proofs of concepts in high-impact papers and to act as an incubator for follow-up projects and applications, while cross-fertilizing knowledge and methods across disciplines and with external stakeholders. Successful candidates will be provided with data-science-grade laptops, conference travel funds, and opportunities to collaborate with international partners. The lab environment provides ergonomic co-working spaces with individual adjustable desks and secondary screens, large blackboards, state-of-the-art projection, video conferencing and HPC equipment. The working language of the CUDAN research group is English. For more information regarding our mission, group members, and ongoing events see https://cudan.tlu.ee.

Requirements for the candidate (incl professional experience)

- A PhD in a computational or quantitative area, such as computer science, information science, network science, physics, or mathematics, while demonstrating understanding or meaningful interest in socio-cultural phenomena. Alternatively, a PhD in a cultural research area, such as art history, computational linguistics, digital humanities, with a strong track record in computation or quantification.

- Demonstrated ability to produce (potentially) high-impact research and work with large-scale (socio-cultural) data, including corpora of visual and audiovisual materials, or capturing the structure and dynamics of multidimensional spaces of (cultural) meaning.

- Either strong skills in audiovisual machine learning, in at least one of the following areas: Computer vision, deep learning, or pattern recognition; image segmentation & feature classification regarding objects, scenes, faces, poses, textures, etc. (aka iconography); 2vec or embed-everything approaches; latent-space cartography; multidimensional data analysis & visualization (manifold learning, diffusion maps, etc.); or another meaningful state-of-the-art application of machine learning that can be useful to make sense of large-scale visual or audiovisual data.

- Or strong quantitative and computational skills, in at least one of the following areas: Data science, information science, or computational social science; socio-physics or reality mining; complexity science or network science; multilayer and temporal network analysis; higher-order graphs or topological data analysis; mathematical modeling (including ecology or socio-cultural dynamics); matrix cluster analysis (as found in network neuroscience, DNA microarray-analysis, or systems biology); multidimensional flow analysis or fluid dynamics; or another meaningful state-of-the-art application of computation and quantification that can be useful for making sense of cultural dynamics.

Desired skills

– Experience in the acquisition and processi