MSCA-IF: Joint application at the University of Granada. Department of Languages and Computer Systems and Department of Experimental Psychology.

Professor Zoraida Callejas and Professor María Teresa Bajo, from the Department of Languages and Computer Systems and the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Granada respectively, welcome postdoctoral candidates interested in applying for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (MSCA-IF) in 2020 at this University. Please note that applicants must comply with the Mobility Rule (more information: http://sl.ugr.es/0aNV).

Brief description of the institution:

The University of Granada (UGR), founded in 1531, is one of the largest and most important universities in Spain. The UGR has been awarded with the "Human Resources Excellence in Research (HRS4R)", which reflects the UGR’s commitment to continuously improve its human resource policies in line with the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers. The UGR is also a leading institution in research, located in the top 5/10 of Spanish universities by a variety of ranking criteria, such as national R&D projects, fellowships awarded, publications, or international funding.

UGR is one of the few Spanish Universities listed in the Shanghai Top 500 ranking (http://sl.ugr.es/0aw0). The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) places the UGR in 268th position in the world and as the 4th highest ranked University in Spain, reaffirming its position as an institution at the forefront of national and international research. From the perspective of specialist areas in the ARWU rankings, the UGR is outstanding in Documentation (ranked in the 36th in the world) or Food science technology (ranked 37th in the world), Mathematics and Computer Science (ranked among the top 76-100 in the world).

The UGR has 4 researchers at the top of the Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list in the Computer Science area. With regard to broader subject fields, the UGR is ranked in 45th position in the universities worldwide in the discipline of Engineering. It is also well recognized for its web presence (http://sl.ugr.es/0a6i) taking 36th place in the top 200 Universities in Europe. Internationally, we bet decidedly by our participation in the calls of the Framework Programme of the European Union. For the duration of the last two Framework Programmes, the UGR has obtained a total of 66 projects, with total funding of 18.02 million euros, and for H2020, 80 projects with total funding around 20.6 million euros.

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group

The Research Centre for Information and Communications Technologies of the University of Granada (CITIC-UGR) has a strong reputation as an international ICT Centre. It faces relevant scientific and technological challenges, transfers knowledge to the productive sector and trains researchers to be engines of socio-economic growth thanks to new technologies. The University of Granada, which is ranked among the top 50 universities in the world in the field of Computer Science, being a pioneer in this area in Spain. The CITIC-UGR spans major research sub-fields such as: Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Computer Vision, Data Mining, Decision Support Systems, e-Health, High Performance Computer Architectures, Image Recognition, Mobile and Sensor Networks, Monitoring and Control Systems, Nanoelectronics, Neural Engineering, Optimization, Planning, Signal Processing, Soft Computing, Software Engineering & Virtual Reality.

The Mind, Brain and Behaviour Research Center (CIMCYC) is devoted to research of excellence in Psychology and Neuroscience. Currently, it hosts 24 groups with more than 250 researchers with diverse interests and many national and international active projects and collaborations. CIMCYC provides a rich environment to foster high-quality research. The centre is fully equipped with relevant neurocognitive technology, FMRI, EEG systems, eye-trackers, TMS, etc. Research in Psychology at UGR is the top of Spanish Universities.

Project description

The aim of the project is to create technological solutions to solve the problems that people with frontal lobe deficits face when using digital technologies. In particular, the researcher will develop new approaches to generate multimodal conversational systems endowed with the ability to recognize and predict cognitive difficulties, metacognitive attitudes, socio-affective variables and emotional reactions. Such technology will provide timely feedback and training, involving a rich perspective that includes emotion recognition, focus and level of attention recognition, natural language understanding and generation, and meta-cognitive dialogue management.

In order to provide assistance to overcome the limitations caused by frontal lobe deficits, the technology produced will be adaptable to a comprehensive heterogeneity of users and application domains recognizing the user’s abilities with a proactive and personalised behaviour, which will pose numerous challenges that will help to push further the boundaries of the different research domains involved and will have important impacts at the scientific, industrial, and socio-economic levels.

The candidate will work in a genuine multidisciplinary environment, as the research proposed will integrate cognitive neuroscience and computer science, including eye-tracking, EEG recording and analysis, computational user modelling, and conversational systems.

Research Area

Social Sciences and Humanities (SOC) and Information Science and Engineering (ENG)

For a correct evaluation of your candidature, please send the documents below to Professor Zoraida Callejas Carrión (zoraida@ugr.es):

• CV
• Letter of recommendation (optional)