Vacancy: PhD candidate in Reinforcement Learning ------------------------------------------------ Applications are invited for a fully funded position for a PhD candidate to work on the development and application of a novel framework for personalised health interventions that combines elements of contextual bandits, causal prediction, and online learning.
The successful candidate will be based in the Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab (AMLab) led by prof. Max Welling within the Informatics Institute of the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The research will be supervised by dr. Joris Mooij of AMLab and dr. Danielle Belgrave of Microsoft Research Cambridge. Application closing date: June 1, 2018 Preferred starting date: Before the end of 2018 Duration: 4 years About the project ----------------- Contextual bandits are often used to personalise user experience for optimising web search results, content displayed to a user and ranking advertisements. In the health care domain, there are many scenarios where we can use a similar approach to personalise the patient’s treatment experience in order to develop the most effective health intervention strategies. However, due to the additional complexity of treatments affecting various outcomes which may underlie a causal relationship and variations in pre- and post-intervention clinical features, it may be more appropriate to extend the contextual bandit framework to incorporate a causal modelling framework. Such an extension can have high impact on the personalisation and effectiveness of health intervention strategies. The goal of this project is to develop a framework for personalised health interventions by combining elements of contextual bandits, causal prediction, and online learning in a novel way. We motivate the setting using scenarios from personalised medicine, but it applies more generally to other domains where interventions directly target features that are causally related to the features we want to control. The developed framework will be refined and applied within the context of an online therapeutic health intervention to support and promote positive behaviour change and mental wellbeing. The student will use information available from an app developed for mental well-being to identify whether we can optimise treatment strategies to improve mental health outcomes for heterogeneous groups of patients with mental health conditions using the framework described in the causal contextual bandit strategy. During the application phase of the PhD, the student will engage with the clinical team in order to understand the problem domain and how to refine the causal contextual bandit framework to the mental health domain. About the academic environment ------------------------------ The student will be employed full-time at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) working with dr. Joris Mooij (promotor) and prof. Max Welling (co-promoter) in AMLAB. The research will be conducted in close collaboration with dr. Danielle Belgrave (co-supervisor) of Microsoft Research Cambridge, and the student will visit Microsoft Research Cambridge during the research. Some of the things we have to offer: * competitive pay and good benefits; * top-50 university worldwide; * very friendly, interactive and international working environment; * excellent computing facilities; * new building located near the city center (10 minutes by bicycle) of one of Europe's most beautiful and lively cities. English is the working language within the Informatics Institute. Since Amsterdam is a very international city where almost everybody speaks and understands English, candidates need not be afraid of the language barrier. Further information ------------------- For further information, including instructions on submitting an application, please see the official job advertisement at: http://www.uva.nl/en/content/vacancies/2018/04/18-197-phd-candidate-in-reinforcement-learning.html?b Informal inquiries can be made by email to Joris Mooij (j.m.mo...@uva.nl). ------------------------------------------------------------- Joris Mooij | Associate Professor Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab (AMLab) Informatics Institute | University of Amsterdam ------------------------------------------------------------- Science Park 904 | 1098 XH Amsterdam +31 (0)20.525.8426 http://jorismooij.nl/ ------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ uai mailing list uai@ENGR.ORST.EDU https://secure.engr.oregonstate.edu/mailman/listinfo/uai
