With apologies for cross-posting, I am posting the following on behalf of my colleague, Ione Fine: 

Two excellent postdoctoral fellowship opportunities with a deadline of January 15th are available at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA:

http://uwin.washington.edu/post-docs/apply-post-docs/

http://escience.washington.edu/postdoctoral-fellowships

Candidates with a strong computational background (e.g., machine learning, computer vision, neuroengineering, etc.) are sought to work on the following project:

Prof. Fine has over several years worked in collaboration with Second Sight (developers of a retinal prosthetic, analogous to a cochlear implant, on the market). She has developed developed a model that, for any given pulse train, is pretty good at predicting what a patient implanted with a retinal prosthetic will see (essentially a linear-nonlinear model with some weird tweaks because the retina is responding to current instead of light).

But what the field really needs is the reverse of this model – we need to be able to predict what electrical pulses (across the set of electrodes) will produce a percept that most closely matches the percept that would normally be elicited by whatever it is the patient is looking at.

It’s actually a really tricky problem for a variety of reasons. Building such a model would be of very high impact on the field, because it wouldn’t just help Second Sight patients – it would likely be generalized by all the other groups trying to build prosthetic devices (e.g., with optogenetics).

Please contact Prof. Fine (ionefine@uw.edu) if you are interested in this particular project or just want information about UWIN (http://uwin.washington.edu/). Feel free to also contact me (arokem@gmail.com) for questions about the Data Science Environment at the University of Washington (http://escience.washington.edu/) and the eScience fellowships.