One Post-Doc position (Middle East Technical University, Informatics Institute, Cognitive Science Program, Ankara, Turkey

Middle East Technical University (METU) Informatics Institute, Cognitive Science Program (Ankara, Turkey) has an available full-time post-doc position for the period of 24 months. The position is available within the European project “IRIS: Towards Natural Interaction and Communication” (Marie Curie Industry-Academia Partnerships and Pathways program, FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IAPP, iris-interaction.eu/), a collaborative R&D project with Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish academic and industrial partners. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement nr 610986.

The IRIS project focuses on senior citizens and citizens with speech impairments. By adopting universal design principles, the candidate will contribute to the development of the most appropriate mixture of user input (gaze, speech, silent speech, gesture, touch, biometry) and output modalities (animated characters with personalized synthetic voices, pictograms), in real settings and within immersive virtual reality experiments depicting visual and aural elements. In these experiments, the candidate will measure the arousal state of the participants via biometric sensing (heart beat rate, electrodermal activation, electromyography of the face, eye tracking, facial expression) where applicable, aiming at classifying their emotions activated during the experiments, via suitable machine learning approaches, towards the improvement of the user interaction experience.

Application: The position is open until filled. Those who are interested should send the detailed CV, with the relevant documents in attachment by email to Cengiz Acartürk via the "APPLY" button. We will only consider electronic submissions.

The candidate should have less than 10 years of research & development experience and with top performance in the area of cognitive science, computer science, multimodal interaction and human computer interaction. Experience in conducting experimental work with eye tracking, haptic devices and fNIRS is welcome.

METU is ranked 85th in the top 400 universities list of Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2014-2015. It is the first and only Turkish university ranked among the top 100 universities. METU was already the first and only university in the top 100 list of World Reputation Rankings in 2012, 2013 and 2014. METU provides a fertile research infrastructure for researchers from different countries. The candidate is expected to participate in a team of researchers at the Cognitive Science Program of METU Informatics Institute, which has been developing in-house natural and multimodal interaction technologies for citizens.

The position has the following conditions:

• This position is full-time for 24 months. Ideally, the successful candidate will commence employment in middle 2015 in Ankara, Turkey.

• At the time of recruitment by METU, the candidate must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc) in Turkeyfor more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to recruitment. Short stays such as holidays and/or compulsory national service are not taken into account.

• Salary (before tax): €57 564.00 plus €10 922.20 for mobility allowance per year (gross amount in line with EC Marie Curie salary rates).Average Turkish income tax rate of 42%

• Applicable laws and regulations follows the European Commission criteria for recruitment for this type of funding under Marie Curie action under the Industry-Academia Partnerships and Pathways (IAPP):http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/desktop/en/opportunities/fp7/calls/fp7-people-2013-iapp.html