Interested applicants should send in an e-mail (odobez@idiap.ch) a motivation letter, a detailed CV, and the names of three references. Informal inquiries are also welcome by email or telephone.

Research: The research will be conducted in the context of the HUMAVIPS project, a 3-year project funded by the European Community. The overall goal of the project is to endow a humanoid robot (NAO, from Aldebaran) with audio-visual sensing and interaction cabilities allowing him to navigate in a complex environment, localize a group of people, join it and interact with it.

The research done at Idiap will focus on the later parts, namely:

• the design of perceptual algorithms to recognize human non-verbal behaviors (when people speak, whom they look at) from audio-visual sensors;
• the investigation of new approaches to model and indentify people interactions and relationships (e.g. who speaks to whom, who is the most important person of the group);
• exploit the recognized conversational patterns and relationship in a robot-to-group of people multimodal interface design allowing the robot to find the appropriate time ways to initiate and take part to a conversation.

The postdoctoral researcher will address one of the above theme. She/he should have a strong background in statistics, applied mathematics, and computer vision. Experience (both from the modeling and hands on perspectives) in one or several of the following areas is required:

• human-human communication modeling;
• robot interaction modeling;
• human-robot or human-computer multimodal interface design.

The applicant should be familiar with C/C++ programming and the Linux environment. The position offers the opportunity to collaborate with the best research teams in europe, and involvment in PhD supervision.

Contract: Starting date: as soon as possible. The initial appointement will be until the end of the project (31/01/2013).
The salary ranges from CHF 70 000 to 75 000/year according to training and previous experience.

Research: The objective of the thesis is to investigate novel algorithms for the automatic segmentation and clustering of people in audio-visual documents. More precisely, the goal is to detect the people who appear in the documents, when they appear or/and when they speak, with whom they speak, and who they are. The work will rely on and improve previous knowledge of the LIUM and IDIAP in speaker diarization, names recognition from automatic speech transcripts, person detection, tracking and recognition, and will be expanded to address the audio-visual identity association and the recognition of the roles of people in the Tv shows. The work will be evaluated in the framework of the REPERE evaluation campaign, which is a challenge for audio and video person detection and recognition in TV broadcasts (journal debates, sitcoms) and will focus on segmentation and clustering targeting well-known people (anchors, journalists, known or introduced persons).

Supervision and organization: The proposed position is funded by the ANR in the SODA project. It is a joint PhD position within both IDIAP and LIUM, under academic co-supervision by Profs. Paul Deléglise (LIUM), Jean-Marc Odobez (IDIAP) and Sylvain Meignier (LIUM). He will work closely with a post-doctoral fellow working for the same project.
The candidate will be registered as a student at the University of Le Mans. He will spent 50% or more of his time at Idiap and the rest at the LIUM in Le Mans, depending on the need. While being at IDIAP, the Ph.D student will be enrolled in the EPFL doctoral program and entitled to follow courses.

Requirements: The successful candidate should have a master in computer science or related field, with a good background in mathematics. Experience or background in statistical learning theory, image processing or computer vision is a plus. The applicant should be familiar with C/C++ programming and the Linux environment. Appointment for the PhD student position is for 3 years.

Starting date: immediately.

Salary: the net salary (after social charges deduction) is around €1700 a month. 18 months or more of indemnity (€500 per month) will be provided to support the extra cost of working at two different sites, as well as the higher cost of life in Martigny.

Contact: Please send a curriculum vitae to Jean-Marc Odobez odobez@idiap.ch and sylvain.meignier@lium.univ-lemans.fr

Idiap is located in Martigny in Valais, a scenic region in the south of Switzerland surrounded by the highest mountains of Europe, which offers multiple recreational activities, including hiking, climbing, and skiing, as well as varied cultural activities, all within close proximity to Lausanne and Geneva. Idiap is an equal opportunity employer and offers a young, multicultural environment where English is the main working language.