There is a vacancy for a permanent position as Associate Professor at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, at the University of Bergen, Norway.
The position focuses on intelligent information systems, including areas such as natural language processing, neuro‑symbolic methods, semantic technologies, multimedia processing, and ethical and trustworthy AI.
Bergen is a beautiful city surrounded by fjords and mountains, and the position offers generous conditions. Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
More information is available in the full announcement here: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/297764/associate-professor-i…
Kind regards,
Samia
---
Samia Touileb
Associate Professor in Natural Language Processing
Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen
MediaFutures: Research Center for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation
Fagspråksenteret: Centre for Norwegian Professional Language
<Apologies for cross-postings>
--------------------------------------
SECOND CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
--------------------------------------
MIRROR@IberLEF20206: Motivational Interviewing Response & Rating via
Synthetic cOnversational tuRns
https://mirror-iberlef.vercel.app/
Challenge platform now online: https://www.mirror-iberlef.lat/dashboard
Just register, log in, and start making submissions.
-------------------------------
***Task description***
-------------------------------
We invite the community to develop Generative AI (GenAI) methods for
creating synthetic conversation turns that can substantially improve the
performance of models trained to recognize behavior codes (BCs) in the
context of motivational interviews. A BC is a discrete, observable
clinician action (e.g., asking a question, giving information) that is
counted during coding of a motivational interviewing session to quantify
specific techniques used. These codes allow raters to tally how often
particular clinician behaviours occur, which helps assess adherence to
MI-consistent versus MI-inconsistent practice. Our ultimate goal is to
generate valuable data for training models for the automatic assessment
of clinicians’ motivational-interviewing skills. These skills — crucial
for promoting behavior change among patients — can be evaluated by using
the “Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI)” rubric
(https://tinyurl.com/38byjrwy).
This is a data-centric competition: participants are expected to produce
high-quality datasets representing a wide range of clinical
conversations (rather than training a model) to enhance the performance
of a frozen baseline model used for BC classification. We encourage
participants to include samples featuring clients from diverse
backgrounds, varied conversation topics, and conversing with different
types of health professionals.
Participants in this competition should provide three datasets (one per
pair of considered BCs) of at most 100 labeled conversation turns that
will be used to fine-tune pretrained models; the fine-tuned models will
then be used to make predictions for a hold-out dataset. The performance
of the fine-tuned model will be used as the leading evaluation metric to
rank participants. The considered pairs of BCs are:
(1) Simple reflection vs. Complex reflection;
(2) Open question vs. Closed question;
(3) Persuasion vs. Giving Information.
Sample submissions, and detailed instructions on the formatting,
evaluation criteria and competition platform will be available at the
MIRROR website.
-------------------------------
***Important dates***
-------------------------------
* Mar 9th: Start of the development phase (platform starts receiving
submissions for the validation set)
* May 1st: Start of the final phase (platform starts receiving
submissions for the test set)
* May 11th: End of evaluation campaign (deadline for submission of runs)
* May 22nd; Publication of official results
* Jun 8th: Deadline for paper submission
* Jun 23th: Acceptance notification
* Jun 30th: Camera-ready submission deadline
* Sep, TBD: Publication of proceedings
* Sep, TBD: Workshop with SEPLN 2026
-------------------------------
***Organizing team***
-------------------------------
* Luis J. Arellano INAOE, Mexico
* Carlos Olachea INAOE, Mexico
* John Piette, University of Michigan, USA
* Hugo Jair Escalante, INAOE, Mexico
* Delia Irazú Hernández, INAOE, Mexico
* Luis Villaseñor, INAOE, Mexico
* Manuel Montes, INAOE, Mexico
Contact: Hugo Jair Escalante (hugo.jair(a)gmail.com)