Job description

Job summary

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a Research Assistant/Associate to undertake work in Natural Language Processing as part of the EPSRC funded “Improving asthma care through personalised risk assessment and support from a conversational agent”. The Research Assistant/Associate will be working with Professor Rafael Calvo (as well as Dorian Peters; and Prof. Jenni Quint) on developing theory and methods to for the design of ethical conversational agents that help people with asthma learn about their risks and know how to, and are motivated to, manage them better.

Responsibilities and duties include developing research objectives and proposals; preparing human research ethics applications; developing algorithms; analysing statistical data; writing presentations and publications.  The role will combine your computer science expertise to our healthcare and design research.

The new activities aim to develop the body of evidence on the design of intelligent systems that support wellbeing, building on research in psychology and design practice.

Duties and responsibilities

Key Responsibilities

The activities associated with this post are:

Develop NLP algorithms for sentiment analysis, Named Entity Recognition and classification

Develop new conversational agent technology using Rasa, voiceflow and other technologies

Evaluate how biases in pretrained language models and transformers can be reduced or eliminated

Collect data either through direct recruitment or through collaboration with our other projects

Analyse data using various statistical techniques, including preforming path analysis.

Publish original research on NLP and HCI 

Maintain accurate and complete records of all findings

Assist with the writing of reports to research sponsors

Present findings to colleagues

Assist with the publication of findings 

Attend relevant workshops and conferences as necessary

Develop contacts within the College and the wider community

Promote the reputation of the Group, the Department and the College

In addition, at Research Associate level:

Take initiatives in the planning of research

Write reports for submission to research sponsors

Submit publications to refereed journals

Provide guidance to staff and students

Contribute to bids for research grants

Conduct and plan own scientific work with appropriate supervision.

Maintain highly organised and accurate record of experimental Work.

Actively participate in the research programme of the Group

Publish in high quality journals and present data at national and international meetings.

Participate in Group research meetings and internal seminars

Collaborate with other allied scientists within Imperial College and elsewhere in London and abroad, as appropriate

Contribute to the smooth running of the Group’s laboratories and, facilities with other scientists, clinicians, technicians and students within the laboratories

Essential requirements

Education

PhD degree in Computer Science, Engineering or Human-Computer Interaction

Knowledge & Experience    

Experience conducting Natural Language Processing research.    

Evidence of previous work in multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder environments.    

Programming in Python    

Understanding of software development processes, using GIT or similar tools    

Skills & Abilities    

Willingness to work flexibly in order to achieve project demands 

Ability to organise and prioritise own work and organise research within the project timetable    

Ability to conduct a detailed review of recent literature

Ability to develop and apply new concepts

Creative approach to problem-solving

Excellent verbal communication skills and the ability to deal with a wide range of people

Excellent written communication skills and the ability to write clearly and succinctly for publication

Ability to organise own work with minimal supervision

Ability to prioritise own work in response to deadlines

Advanced computer skills, including statistical tools like SPSS or R, word-processing, spreadsheets and the Internet

Ability to direct the work of a small research team and motivate others to produce a high standard of work  (Associate)

Further information

*Candidates who have not yet been officially awarded their PhD will be appointed as Research Assistant within the salary range £36,694 - £39,888 per annum.