Assistant Professorship (all genders) – Tenure Track

The TU Wien Faculty of Informatics seeks to fill the open tenure-track position of an Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing. The position is affiliated with both the Data Science Research Unit, part of the Faculty of Informatics, and the Complexity Science Hub. The estimated starting date is January 2026.

The work contract is initially limited to six years. The candidate and TU Wien can agree upon a tenure evaluation, which when positive, opens the possibility to change the position to Associate Professor with an unlimited contract.

TU Wien is among the most successful technical universities in Europe, and it is Austria’s largest scientific-technical research and educational institution. The Faculty of Informatics, one of the eight faculties at TU Wien, plays an active role in national and international research and has an excellent reputation. The main areas of research include Computer Engineering, Logic and Computation, Visual Computing & Human-Centered Technology, as well as Information Systems Engineering.

Complexity Science successfully models multiple aspects of society to provide key insights to decision makers. This success arises through understanding data not in isolation but taking the complexity of interdependencies and interconnections into account. Benefits include using insights obtained from the data to improve public services, or to better understand the impacts on society of changes in legislation or of external factors such as natural disasters.
Tasks:
Text is a data modality that is not used to its full potential in Complexity Science, even though useful information for model parametrisation can be obtained from multiple text sources: government (e.g., patents, legislation, court decisions), commercial (e.g., company annual reports), medical (e.g., patient records), scientific (e.g., scientific papers, historical documents), and civil (e.g., social media). Thus, we invite applications from candidates with a focus on Natural Language Processing approaches to reliably obtain trustworthy information from text as input to models and simulations of societally-relevant phenomena. As the text data is often analysed for purposes for which it was not originally collected, it is necessary to compensate for potential biases. The possible unreliability of outputs of recent neural NLP methods, such as LLMs, also presents a challenge for using their outputs in further analyses, with a potential solution presented by the combination of neural and symbolic approaches. The candidate is expected to contribute both to foundational work on Natural Language Processing as well as to applied work on solutions to real-world problems in an interdisciplinary setting.

The following list highlights some potential research topics of a successful candidate:

Natural Language Processing
Computational Linguistics
Text Mining
Information Extraction
Information Retrieval
Neural and Symbolic AI
Network Science
Dynamics of Complex Systems
Graph Neural Networks
Privacy-aware analytics
Human-in-the-loop
Explainability and interpretability
Algorithm and data biases

The candidate will work at the interface of Data Science and Complexity Science together with companies and public administrations. The Digital Humanism Initiative on ensuring that technology development remains centred on human interests should play a central role in this work. Candidates should have a background and experience in building prototypes that target a well-defined application area and analyse real-world data. We are particularly interested in candidates working in areas that will complement our existing expertise and lead to fruitful collaborations with other members of TU Wien Informatics, TU Wien in general, and the Complexity Science Hub.

Besides research, the duties of an Assistant Professor at TU Wien include graduate and undergraduate teaching (in English and German), supervision of student work, as well as contributing to usual management and faculty service tasks. We expect the position holder to provide leadership in delivering and developing the Master program Data Science as well as to teach courses in this program and in the other programs of the Faculty of Informatics.

You will be part of an international working environment with employees of the TU Wien Faculty of Informatics and the Complexity Science Hub originating from at least 50 countries. The working language at both the Faculty of Informatics and the Complexity Science Hub is English.
Your profile:
Applicants are expected to have the following qualifications:

Essential

PhD or doctoral degree in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or related subjects
Post-doctoral experience at a university or research institution
An outstanding research and publication record
Experience in interdisciplinary research
An excellent reputation as an active member of the international scientific community
Experience in raising research funds and managing scientific research projects
Experience in university teaching
Pedagogic and didactic skills
Administrative and organizational skills

Desirable

Leadership skills and experience
Proficiency in German, or willingness to learn
Experience in working with companies or public administrations
Gender sensitivity and social skills
We offer:
A tenure-track position with a full career path, consisting of the following milestones:At the beginning of the employment, a qualification agreement is signed with the university
Upon successful fulfilment of the qualification agreement within 5 years, the candidate is promoted to associate professor with tenure
Subsequent excellent achievements can lead to promotion to full professor
Excellent working conditions in an international research environment
An attractive salary, including additional contributions to a pension fund
A mentoring program for assistant professors
Support for relocating to Vienna (if required)
A position in a city with an exceptional quality of life
Additional benefits for employees can be found at the following link: Fringe-Benefit Catalogue of TU Wien

We look forward to receiving your application until May 22, 2025 on our job

platform: https://jobs.tuwien.ac.at/Job/248962