The Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines is currently looking for students who could work on various research projects. If you are interested please submit your application by sending your resume to: laura [at] iiim.is. Salary is commensurate with experience. Descriptions of projects and open positions follow in this post.

Research on Icelandic Banking System

A student (B.Sc or M.Sc) is needed with interest in the Financial System to assist with research on Index linked and housing association loans in Iceland. The research will be to establish the exact terms of loans made, and also to determine their accounting treatment by the Banks, and will assist with building a model of the Icelandic banking system and preparing a paper describing its behaviour over time. Estimated time 1-2 months at 50%, but with flexible scheduling.

Graphical Displays

A student (M.Sc or advanced B.Sc) with good programming skills is needed to take an existing simulation of the Fractional Reserve Banking System and extend it to have an animated display of the money flows created by the debt created by the system over time. Project is envisioned as an opengl extension written in python; but java or C++ could also be used. Estimated time 2-3 months at 50% effort. There is scope for extending the project beyond the initial task to create a graphical construction tool that would allow users to easily setup banking networks and debt flows to explore specific scenarios, and providing a web based implementation in javascript.

Economic History/Simulation

A student with interest in the financial system and programming (M.Sc or Ph.D) is needed to research the gold standard system, determine the regulatory framework it used, and extend an existing simulation of the fractional reserve banking system written in python to be a full reproduction of the gold standard framework. Project would be the first simulation of the gold standard framework, and would contribute to understanding of historical financial instability in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Estimated time 3-6 months at 50%.

Create a Simple Model of Currency Flows

Using java or C++/QT, create a simulation that allows currency flows to be modelled between countries, by assuming different rates of expansion of the underlying money supply and varying numbers of exchange transactions. Graphical display of resulting network flows. Estimated time, 3 months @ 50%.

Spatio-semantic Navigation

We are looking for a student(B.Sc or M.Sc) to extend an existing software package for performing robot navigation combined with semantic reasoning to produce a demo and help prepare a paper on the system. Student must have strong C++ programming skills, particularly on Windows. This task should take approximately 2-3 months at 50% effort, but there is some flexibility in scheduling.

Collaboration Project With One of Our Industry Partners

Starting probably in February, we need one student (B.Sc or M.Sc) to perform basic experiments with supervised learning algorithms on a small, but potentially complex data set. Student should be familiar with basic machine learning algorithms, such as neural networks, decision trees, etc. This task should take approximately one month at 50% effort, and the student will need to devote at least 50% time to the project. This work could possibly extend into a second phase lasting several more months.

Learning Natural Turn-taking Behavior

Starting sometime aroundthe summer, we need a graduate student (M.Sc or Ph.D) to work on developing and testing machine learning methods in a human-computer dialog system. Requires strong C++ programming skills, and student should ideally be prepared to stay with the project for a period of at least one year.

Radio Show Host

We need one student (B.Sc or M.Sc) to work on various data gathering modules for an artificial radio show host. There are various potential sources of knowledge that the radio host could use such as musicbrainz database and Google queries but the results need to be formatted into text that can be used for spoken dialogue or monologue. This task should take 4-6 months at 50% effort, but there is some flexibility in scheduling.

Creating an Annotated Database of Spoken Sentences From Human Speakers

People give indications at the end of each sentence of whether they are giving or holding a turn, by modifying their pitch slightly. We need a student (B.Sc or M.Sc) to gather audio samples of human speakers into a database of dialogue speech samples. On top of that a program module has to be created that can fetch and play audio clips from this database given some search criteria to simulate a human speaker. This task should take 2-3 months at 50% effort.