Post-doctoral research fellow

The University of Eastern Finland, UEF, is one of the largest multidisciplinary universities in Finland. We offer education in nearly one hundred major subjects, and are home to approximately 15,000 students and 2,800 members of staff. We operate on three campuses in Joensuu, Kuopio and Savonlinna. In international rankings, we are ranked among the leading 300 universities in the world.

The Faculty of Science and Forestry operates on the Kuopio and Joensuu campuses of the University of Eastern Finland. The mission of the faculty is to carry out internationally recognised scientific research and to offer research-education in the fields of natural sciences and forest sciences. The faculty invests in all of the strategic research areas of the university. The faculty’s environments for research and learning are international, modern and multidisciplinary.  The faculty has approximately 3,800 Bachelor’s and Master’s degree students and some 490 postgraduate students. The number of staff amounts to 560. http://www.uef.fi/en/lumet/etusivu

We are now inviting applications for

a Postdoctoral Researcher (Speech/Audio Processing), School of Computing, Joensuu Campus 

The Machine Learning research group of the School of Computing at the University of Eastern Finland (http://www.uef.fi/en/web/cs) is looking for a highly motivated researcher to work in the group.

The current research topics in the group include speaker and language recognition, voice conversion, spoofing and countermeasures for speaker recognition, robust feature extraction, and analysis of environmental sounds. Prior experience in these topics is a plus, though we invite candidates widely from general speech/audio/language processing, machine learning or signal processing background. We expect the new Postdoctoral Researcher to bring in complementary skills and expertise.

The recruited Postdoctoral Researcher will take a major role in advancing research in one of the above-listed (or closely related) topics. He or she will also have a significant role in the supervision of students and certain administrative duties, and he or she will work closely with Associate Professor Kinnunen and the other members of the group. The position is strongly research-focused.

The School of Computing, located in Joensuu Science Park, provides modern research facilities with access to high-performance computing services. Our research group hosted the Odyssey 2014 conference  (http://cs.uef.fi/odyssey2014/), is a partner in the ongoing H2020 funded OCTAVE project (https://www.octave-project.eu/) focused on voice biometrics, is a co-founder of the Automatic Speaker Verification and Countermeasures (ASVspoof) challenge series (http://www.spoofingchallenge.org/) and has hosted international summer schools. We take actively part in international benchmarking and other collaboration activities. We follow a multidisciplinary research perspective that targets at understanding the speech signal, as well as applying the acquired knowledge to new application areas.

A person to be appointed as a postdoctoral researcher shall hold a suitable doctoral degree that has been awarded less than five years ago. The doctoral degree should be in spoken language technology, electrical engineering, computer science, machine learning or a closely related field. He/she should be comfortable with Unix/Linux, Matlab/Octave and/or Python, processing of large datasets and with strong hands-on experience and creative out-of-the-box problem solving attitude.

The position will be filled from May 1, 2017 until December 31, 2018. The continuation of the position will be agreed separately.

The positions of postdoctoral researcher shall always be filled for a fixed term (UEF University Regulations 31 §).

The salary of the position is determined in accordance with the salary system of Finnish universities and is based on level 5 of the job requirement level chart for teaching and research staff (€2.865,30/ month). In addition to the job requirement component, the salary includes a personal performance component, which may be a maximum of 46.3% of the job requirement component.

For further information on the position, please contact: Associate Professor Tomi Kinnunen, email: tkinnu@cs.uef.fi, tel. +358 50 442 2647.  For further information on the application procedure, please contact: Executive Head of Administration Arja Hirvonen, tel. +358 44 716 3422, email: arja.hirvonen@uef.fi.

A probationary period is applied to all new members of the staff.

The electronic application should contain the following appendices:

- a cover letter indicating the position to be applied for and a free-worded motivation letter
- a résumé or CV 
- a list of publications
- copies of the applicant's academic degree certificates/ diplomas, and copies of certificates / diplomas relating to the applicant’s language proficiency, if not indicated in the academic degree certificates/diplomas
- the names and contact information of at least two referees

The application needs to be submitted no later than March 24, 2017 (by 24:00 EET) by using the electronic application form: