Attention conservation notice: Advertising an academic position in fields you don't work in, in a place you don't want to live, paying much less than the required skills can get from private industry.
We have a tenure-track opening at the intersection of statistics and complex social systems, a.k.a. computational social science:
The Department of Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University invites applications for a tenure track position in Computational Social Science at the rank of Assistant Professor starting in Fall 2025. This position will be affiliated with the Institute for Complex Social Dynamics.The Department seeks candidates in the areas of social science statistics and data science, as well as related interdisciplinary fields. Potential areas of interest include network science, social simulation, data science for social good, simulation-based inference, cultural evolution, using large text and image corpora as data, and data privacy. Candidates with other research interests related to the work of both the Department and the Institute are also highly encouraged to apply.
The Institute for Complex Social Dynamics brings together scholars at Carnegie Mellon University who develop and apply mathematical and computational models to study large-scale complex social phenomena. The core members of the Institute are based in the Departments of Statistics and Data Science, Social and Decision Sciences, and Philosophy. Interests of the Institute include studies of the emergence of social behavior, the spread of misinformation, social inequality, and societal resilience.
As tenure-track faculty, the successful candidate will be expected to develop an independent research agenda, leading to publications in leading journals in both statistics and in suitable social-scientific venues; to teach courses in the department at both the undergraduate and graduate level; to supervise Ph.D. dissertations; to obtain grants; and in general to build a national reputation for their scholarship. The candidate will join the ICSD as a Core Member, and help shape the future of the Institute.
CMU's statistics department is unusually welcoming to those without traditional disciplinary backgrounds in statistics (after all, I'm here!), and that goes double for this position. If this sounds interesting, then apply by December 15th. (I'm late in posting this.) If this sounds like it would be interesting to your doctoral students / post-docs / other proteges, then encourage them to apply.
(If you'd like to join the statistics department, but are not interested in
complex social dynamics what's wrong with you? we
have another tenure
track opening, where I'm not on the hiring committee.)
Posted at November 25, 2024 10:30 | permanent link
Attention conservation notice: Soliciting applications for a limited-time research job in an arcane field you neither understand nor care about, which will at once require specialized skills and pay much less than those skills command in industry.
I am, for the first time, hiring a post-doc:
The Department of Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University invites applicants for a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in simulation-based inference. The fellow will work with Prof. Cosma Shalizi of the department on developing theory, algorithms and applications of random feature methods in simulation-based inference, with a particular emphasis on social-scientific problems connected to the work of CMU's Institute for Complex Social Dynamics. Apart from by the supervisor, the fellow will also be mentored by other faculty in the department and the ICSD, depending on their interests and secondary projects, and will get individualized training in both technical and non-technical professional skills.Successful applicants will have completed a Ph.D. in Statistics, or a related quantitative discipline, by September 2025, and ideally have a strong background in non-convex and stochastic optimization and/or Monte Carlo methods, and good programming and communication skills. Prior familiarity with simulation-based inference, social network models and agent-based modeling will be helpful, but not necessary.
Basically, I need someone who is much better than I am at stochastic optimization to help out with the matching-random-features idea. But I hope my post-doc will come up with other things to do, unrelated to their ostensible project (God knows I did), and I promise not to put my name on anything unless I actually contribute. If you don't have a conventional background in statistics, well, I'm open to that, for obvious reasons.
Beyond that, the stats. department is a genuinely great and supportive place to work, I hope for fabulous things from ICSD, and CMU has a whole has both a remarkable number of people doing interesting work and remarkably low barriers between departments; Pittsburgh is a nice and still-affordable place to live. Apply, by 15 December!
--- If I have sold you on being a post-doc here, but not on my project or on me, may I interest you in working on social networks dynamics with my esteemed colleague Nynke Niezink?
(The post-doc ad is official, but this blog post is just me, etc., etc.)
Posted at November 14, 2024 23:20 | permanent link