I am looking to hire two post-docs!
You will need to submit a CV and other supporting documentation (information is within the submission system). Application deadline is August 2. Interviews will take place early Fall. Both post-doc positions will be full time with the University of Birmingham and are set to start January 2022 for a period of two years. However, depending on when you finish your PhD or any prior position, it should be possible to move the start date earlier or later.
For more information on the role, don’t hesitate to contact me after you’ve read the info below.
You will join an exciting new research project called Making Numbers Meaningful, funded by the UKRI as part of the Future Leaders Fellowship program. The project is focused on studying numerical communication multimodally, looking at data visualization, numerical language, and even gesture, integrating insights from different disciplines (linguistics, computer science, cognitive science etc.).
The project has two strands:
Strand One investigates numerical communication “in the wild”, looking at data visualizations, numerical language, and gesture in a diverse range of texts, including TV news, newspapers, the UK government’s COVID press briefings, corporate annual reports etc. This strand is heavy on corpus and computational linguistics.
Strand Two is experimental and assesses the impact of specific data visualizations, numerical language, and gestures on people’s understanding and decision making, also with respect to their math anxiety and innumeracy. An important focus will be to look at interactions between communicative modalities, such as how producing specific manual gestures during a presentation of data can change the interpretation of quantifiers, or how spatial language can influence people’s understanding of graphs. This project is heavy on behavioral experiments.
The project also has a strong applied component, including ongoing collaborations with industry partners, such as the data science apprenticeship firm Digital Native, Birmingham Innovation Campus, and the ‘BrumAI’ Birmingham Artificial Intelligence network. Among other things, the goal is to develop communication-focused training materials, workshops, and a MOOC targeted at data scientists. In addition, we’ll organize some fun data visualization hackathons!
The project is highly interdisciplinary. As “numerical communication” is a vast field with many different angles, I am open to a wide range of applicants. I’m excited about the opportunity to work together with people from different fields and create an interdisciplinary team.
Computer scientist:
You either have 1) extensive experience with computer vision to aid the automated detection and classification of graphs and/or gestures in data bases such as the TV News Archive, or you have 2) extensive experience in NLP and knowledge extraction, especially if any of it has to do with multimodal documents.
Among other things, a long-term goal of the project is to develop a way of extracting the “numerical finger print” of multimodal documents, which will require bringing together NLP and computer vision skills. It is a hard computational challenge to relate different pieces of numerical information to each other within the same document (vague quantifiers, aspects of graphs, numeral expressions etc.). In addition, it is planned to release large-scale databases of automatically annotated numerical language and graphs, as well as tools for scientists that facilitate the automated analysis of numerical communication.
Psychologist/linguist:
I am very open to applications from all areas of psychology, linguistics and the cognitive sciences more generally, but a skill set that is complementary to mine is a big plus. Specifically, it would be really useful if your research is in any of the following areas:
For this role, a goal is to run web experiments on numerical communication, so experience with web based experimentation is a plus, but not a requirement.