Job ID: 114065

PhD student position “The Language of Dreams: a mobile-web interface for linguistic analysis of dream content“ – 3 years

Position: Ph.D. Student

Deadline: 27 July 2023

Employment Start Date: 1 November 2023

Contract Length: 3 years

City: Camerino

Country: Italy

Institution: University of Camerino

Department: School of Biosciences

Description:

1 PhD position in “Computer Science and Mathematics”

Project Description

While we dream, we are exposed to a wide gamut of internally generated experiences, from simple thoughts to complex movie-like stories. These experiences typically draw on previously acquired memories and beliefs and are tightly related to our mental and physical health, as testified by alterations in the frequency or content of dreams in many psychiatric and neurological disorders. Dreams have been long investigated mainly through subjective scales and questionnaires, which entail risks of evaluation error and experimenter bias and limit the applicability to large data samples. To overcome these limitations, there is the need to adopt standardized, information technology-based data collection approaches and use of quantitative, automated, and reproducible analysis methods such as those based on natural language processing.

The aim of the 3-year PhD research project is to define an unconventional pipeline based on advanced data science methods to be applied to the dream reports set and to deliver an open-access, expandable, high-quality IT framework suitable to support each step of the data processing. The final objective is to make the dream repository and the data management framework available for future basic and translational applications.

We are looking for a motivated student with a degree in computer science or equivalent, fluent in coding, and passionate about the topics related to this PhD project (e.g., computational linguistics, dreams, consciousness).

Salary after taxes: € 1.2K/month (+50% for periods spent abroad)

Location: University of Camerino, at the Brain and Sleep Research Laboratory of School of Biosciences and at BioShape and Data Science Lab at the School of Science and Technology. Relevant publications and key interests of the research groups can be found at https://www.bsr-laboratory.org/ and http://www.emanuelamerelli.eu/bigdata/doku.php

The PhD student will be working in an interdisciplinary environment under the supervision of Prof. Michele Bellesi (Professor of Neuroscience and Pi of the project) and Prof. Emanuela Merelli (Professor of Computer Science). The research group includes post-doctoral fellows, PhD students, and trainees with different backgrounds including neuroscience, biology, engineering, and physics.

For information michele.bellesi@unicam.it

To apply https://www.unicam.it/bandi/2023/bando-n-44723-del-26062023