The group was founded in 2019 and is growing since then. We are a diverse group with strong feelings for the mission of AutoML: democratization of machine learning by supporting developers and users in efficiently creating new AI applications. We do a mix between basic and applied research with funded projects from industry, DFG, BMBF, BMWI, BMU and ERC. In particular, the ERC starting grant from Prof. Lindauer enables the group to open up new exciting research directions with excellent long-term funding. With several of his prior groups, Prof. Lindauer won many international, prestigious competitions, such as ASP and SAT competitions, AutoML competitions and black-box optimization for hyperparameter optimization. Besides publications at top-tier venues, open-source is at the heart of the research group, leading to increased visibility, improved reproducibility and fair research. 

Hannover is at the center of Germany. Although Hannover is one of the greenest cities in Germany, it has an (undeserved) underdog image. As the capital of Lower Saxony, you can find in Hannover everything you are looking for, incl. concerts, museums, a big zoo, and all kinds of events and shopping opportunities. If you think this is not enough, you can take the train to go to Hamburg or Berlin within 1h and 30min.

The LUH is neither one of these very young universities, nor one of these very old universities. It goes back to 1831 and these days it combines the best of both worlds by having 87 degree courses, roughly 30 000 students, being funded with more than 500 Mio Euro each year, and having more than 300 professors from all kinds of disciplines (source). Our faculty of electrical engineering and computer science combines the expertise in the most important areas for digitization. Close-by companies also allow to transfer research insights into relevant practical solutions and make it easy to find jobs after graduation.

First of all and in contrast to many non-EU countries, paid holidays (~30 days per year), paid sick leave, paid parental leave and health insurance are included. Furthermore,  in contrast to many other countries, you will receive a fairly good salary (see 100% E13 for Phd students and E14 for PostDocs), which is even competitive with the salary for a young researcher or research engineer at big tech companies in Germany. Furthermore, you will have fairly little obligations: besides doing your research, you can roughly expect to support the group and the institute one day per week (e.g., teaching) and depending on the funding of your contract, one day for working on a specific project (which will synergize with your PhD topic). So, you can work on your own (AutoML / NLP related) research at least 60% of your time — much more than in most other countries. If you are a PostDoc, you can even apply for your own grant money (e.g., via DFG) and start your own research group.

We first check your documents (with a focus on the motivation letter). If your documents show promise, we will ask you to solve an AutoML-related coding task to show us that you can implement basic AutoML and ML/DL ideas. If that is also satisfying, we will have a roughly 2h interview (either on-site or virtual) checking your understanding of different topics and your expectations for this job. The last step is a short research presentation (e.g., about your master thesis topic) and a meeting with the entire group. You can expect that this process requires between 1 and 2 months before we can make the final decision whether to give you an offer or not. (Please note that for PostDoc applications, there are shortcuts for this process depending on prior experience.)