in natural language processing and machine learning for healthcare

We currently offer the PhD position titled PhD-quantifying-disagreement-and-uncertainty where you will be responsible for developing, building, and testing clinical LLMs that model uncertainty and disagreement in annotations (input) and predictions (output). You will develop solutions and apply them to learning from patient electronic health records (EHRs) and free text.

Furthermore, you will:

• Liaise with a network of clinical partners of the CaRe-NLP project and will tackle relevant healthcare problems using rich real-world clinical data;
• Have access to excellent HPC facilities and strong support to publish the results of your work in the best scientific conferences and journals in NLP, ML, (medical) AI, and healthcare in general;
• Contribute to the mentoring of master's students on topics related to your research.

You have:

• A MSc degree in computer science, natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, statistics, or a related discipline;
• A strong technical background and experience with natural language processing and machine learning methods, toolkits, and best practices;
• Experience with or interest in learning about pretraining and adapting LLMs using large datasets and/or uncertainty quantification with neural networks and generative models (e.g., LLMs, VAEs, GANs, diffusion models);
• Programming skills in Python and ML libraries (PyTorch);
• A responsible, independent and resilient mindset, and you speak English fluently.

Furthermore, these are required but helpful:

• You have experience with data processing pipelines and with pre-training/fine-tuning/deploying Large Language Models in HPC;
• You contributed to open-source projects;
• You have experience with clinical data and related application areas (e.g., cancer, primary/intensive care);
• You have knowledge of the Dutch language, since much of the data you will work with includes free-text clinical notes in Dutch.

• A stimulating and inclusive research environment with ample opportunity for collaboration.
• You will be employed by Amsterdam UMC Research BV.
• A contract for 12 months with the prospect of extension for 4 years upon satisfactory performance.
• Pension accrual with BeFrank, a modern, comprehensible and fairly priced pension.
• For >7 km each way, 100% reimbursement for public transport travel costs and, for private transport, €0.18 per km up to a maximum of 40 km each way.
• Do you prefer walking or cycling? Take advantage of our good bike scheme. Moreover, you will receive a reimbursement of €0.18 per km.

Watch this video with more information about joining Amsterdam UMC Research BV.