Postdoc in Computational Linguistics / AI

We are looking for a leading postdoctoral researcher within the new EU grant HEu-CL1-TRUSTING-101080251 – “A TRUSTworthy speech-based AI monitorING system for the prediction of relapse in psychosis patients”, Horizon Europe (2021-2027), funded by the European Research Council. The project’s aim is to predict relapse in psychosis through an AI-based speech monitoring system. It will start on 1 July 2023. As a successful candidate you would be incorporated at the Barcelona end of this project and, at the same time, become part of a highly integrated international research network comprising leading experts at three additional European sites: Groningen, Zürich, and Tromsoe. In Barcelona you will join the Grammar & Cognition (GraC) lab (www.upf.edu/web/grac, PI: Wolfram Hinzen), whose mission is to study altered language patterns in mental disorders. GraC is a unique and highly interdisciplinary environment based at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (www.upf.edu), at the Poblenou campus. The main language of the lab and the project is English.

Successful candidates must be highly motivated to apply methods from natural language processing and AI to solve clinical problems in psychiatry. You will play a leading role in a team seeking to develop and validate speech- and text-based models of psychosis, and to assess their clinical potential in predicting relapse. The generalizability of results across datasets from different languages will be a crucial aim. You will work in a collaborative, multi-disciplinary environment and have the opportunity to draw from the substantial resources of the network. Our local cross-disciplinary infrastructure at Barcelona comprises leading computational and theoretical linguistic groups, the UPF’s Center of Brain & Cognition (CBC), and the Brain Dynamics and Structure of Human Cognition (BraCo) group (shared with the Universitat de Barcelona at Bellvitge). 

The appointee should be an experienced researcher with at least 4 years of relevant research experience. You will:

• Be a lead researcher in a work package dedicated to the crosslinguistic validation of language-based biomarkers in psychosis.
• Creatively develop and test tools in modelling deviations in speech and language computationally. 
• Collaborate closely with research and clinical teams at other project sites. 
• Be the lead author on high-level publications. 

Please direct all prior inquiries to the PI at wolfram.hinzen@upf.edu.