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Have you recently completed or expect very soon an MSc or equivalent degree in computer science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, engineering, or a related area? Are you interested in carrying out research on automatic translation during the next few years? Are you excited to spend a part of your life in a pleasant city in the heart of the Italian Alps?
WE ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!!!
The Machine Translation https://mt.fbk.eu/ (MT) group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento, Italy) in conjunction with the ICT International Doctorate School of the University of Trento https://iecs.unitn.it/ is pleased to announce the availability of the following fully-funded PhD position:
TITLE: Resource-efficient Foundation Models for Automatic Translation
DESCRIPTION:
The advent of foundation models has led to impressive advancements in all areas of natural language processing. However, their huge size poses limitations due to the significant computational costs associated with their use or adaptation. When applying them to specific tasks, fundamental questions arise: do we actually need all the architectural complexity of large and - by design - general-purpose foundation models? Can we optimize them to achieve higher efficiency? These questions spark interest in research aimed at reducing models’ size, or deploying efficient decoding strategies, so as to accomplish the same tasks while maintaining or even improving performance. Success in this direction would lead to significant practical and economic benefits (e.g., lower adaptation costs, the possibility of local deployment on small-sized hardware devices), as well as advantages from an environmental impact perspective towards sustainable AI. Focusing on automatic translation, this PhD aims to understand the functioning dynamics of general-purpose massive foundation models and explore possibilities to streamline them for specific tasks. Possible areas of interest range from textual and speech translation (e.g., how to streamline a massively multilingual model to best handle a subset of languages?) to scenarios where the latency is a critical factor, such as in simultaneous/streaming translation (e.g., how to streamline the model to reduce latency?), to automatic subtitling of audiovisual content (e.g., how to streamline the model without losing its ability to generate compact outputs suitable for subtitling?).
CONTACTS: Matteo Negri (negri@fbk.eu), Luisa Bentivogli (bentivo@fbk.eu)
COMPLETE DETAILS AVAILABLE AT:
https://iecs.unitn.it/education/admission/call-for-application
IMPORTANT DATES:
The deadline for application is May 7th, 2024, hrs. 04:00 PM (CEST)
Prospective candidates are strongly invited to contact us in advance for preliminary interviews. Precedence for interviews will be given to short-listed candidates that will send us a complete CV via email ( negri@fbk.eu, bentivo@fbk.eu) by April 22, 2024.
Candidate profile
The ideal candidate must have recently completed or expect very soon an MSc or equivalent degree in computer science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, engineering, or a closely related area. In addition, the applicant should:
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Have an interest in Machine and Speech Translation -
Have experience in deep learning and machine learning, in general -
Have good programming skills in Python and experience in PyTorch -
Enjoy working with real-world problems and large data sets -
Have good knowledge of written and spoken English -
Enjoy working in a closely collaborating team
Working Environment
The doctoral student will be employed at the MT group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy. The group (about 10 people including staff and students) has a long tradition in research on machine and speech translation and is currently involved in several projects. Former students are nowadays employed in leading IT companies in the world.
Benefits
Fondazione Bruno Kessler offers an attractive benefits package, including a flexible work week, full reimbursement for conferences and summer schools, a competitive salary, an excellent team of supervisors and mentors, help with housing, full health insurance, the possibility of Italian courses, and sporting facilities.
Further Information
For preliminary interviews, and should you need further information about the position, please contact Matteo Negri (negri@fbk.eu) and Luisa Bentivogli (bentivo@fbk.eu).
Best Regards,
Matteo Negri