Research Associate in Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Vehicles

UE07: £40,247.00 - £47,874.00 Per Annum.

CSE / School of Informatics.

Fixed Term Contract - 2 Years.

Full Time - 35 Hours Per Week.

The Opportunity:

This post will be part of the Centre for AI for Assistive Autonomy, a mission-driven research centre established using a UKRI Turing AI World Leading Researcher Fellowship awarded to Prof Subramanian Ramamoorthy. 

The post-holder will be the lead researcher anchoring laboratory activities in the area of Artificial Intelligence for autonomous vehicles, with a focus on human-centred settings including shared autonomy and autonomous operation in crowded urban environments. This represents one of the main application themes within the centre, alongside assistive technology in healthcare domains. This work benefits from parallel work of a foundations team, whose focus will be on fundamental investigations into generative modelling of the full stack of human behaviour, from sensorimotor control to higher level cognitive decision making, to enable the development of person-centred and teachable autonomous systems. 

The post holder will be supervised by the Centre Director (Ramamoorthy). The post holder will also have the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues in a wide range of specialties across the University, including in machine learning and vision (e.g. Fisher, Mac Aodha, Bilen, Sevilla-Lara, Vergari), probabilistic programming (e.g. Narayanaswamy, Kammar, Belle), natural language understanding and interaction (e.g. Lascarides, Lapata, Gal), computational cognitive science and neuroscience (e.g. Lucas, Hennig, Nolan, Rajendran), as well as in robotics and neurotechnology (e.g. Vijayakumar, Nazarpour) and engineering of novel sensing and devices (Prodromakis, Koutsos, Amjadi). Beyond the university, the Centre will pursue collaborations with international teams including at The University of Texas at Austin (Stone), Stanford University (Kochenderfer), University of Bremen (Beetz) and Monash University (Burke).

The Centre will also have a strong industrial partner network, including Fourier Intelligence, Honda Research Europe, Shadow Robot, Sony Europe and other organisations who will be engaged in the Centre’s work at all stages, with the expectation that this network grows over time as the Centre’s work grows and begins to have broader impacts.

The central purpose of the job is to investigate human-centred AI methods to enable novel applications including shared autonomy and autonomous operation in crowded urban environments. 

This work builds on an established track record with autonomous systems that been deployed in field trials within Five (a Bosch company). Following this earlier work and an equipment donation to establish new laboratory facilities, this post holder will be a crucial part of a new initiative within the university to explore emerging issues for next generation mobility systems. With the support of three research engineers who are part of this laboratory, we are undertaking efforts to create a novel Edinburgh dataset focussed on driving in dense urban environments, a resource that will be available for the post holder to build on.

The post holder will be expected to address a range of issues including the following:

• Real-time perception for human intention and environmental state inference 
• Human-in-the-loop adaptation strategies for shared autonomy 
• Interactive decision making methods in urban driving environments
• Planning and decision making in interactions involving vulnerable road users (pedestrians, cyclsists, etc.)
• Large scale data-driven modelling of driver behaviour in urban environments

The candidate is expected to take intellectual ownership of core scientific questions in this space, developing new ideas and driving collaborative projects towards significant publications, leveraging the expertise of the supervision team and other scientific collaborators. 

It is also expected that the post holder will contribute to the development of new assets in the form of experimental robotic systems and demonstrators. These will be expected to make use of data and model assets created by other Centre researchers.

Your skills and attributes for success: 

Essential:

• A PhD (or near completion) in AI and/or robotics, with a focus on autonomous vehicles applications 
• An excellent track record of publications in top-tier journals (e.g. IEEE Trans. or broad-interest science venues) and/or conferences in AI (e.g. IJCAI, AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR), robotics (e.g. R:SS, CoRL, ICRA), or allied areas
• Excellent proven experience of developing field robotics systems 
• Ability to work effectively as part of a team, to meet deadlines, and to report on project progress
• Ability to communicate complex information clearly, orally and in writing.

Desirable:

• Research experience with methods for learning and decision making in sequential decision making problems with humans in the loop
• Research experience with real-time perception and scene understanding methods based on state-of-the-art machine learning methods
• Hands-on experience of designing and conducting field experiments, including human subject studies 
• Demonstrated experience of the development and management of projects involving multiple stakeholders.

Click to view a copy of the full job description (opens new browser tab)

Application Information: 

Please ensure you include the following documents in your application:

- CV

- Cover letter

Contact details for informal enquiries: Ram Ramamoorthy, s.ramamoorthy@ed.ac.uk 

As a valued member of our team you can expect: 

• A competitive salary
• An exciting, positive, creative, challenging and rewarding place to work. 
• To be part of a diverse and vibrant international community
• Comprehensive Staff Benefits, such as a generous holiday entitlement, competitive pension schemes, staff discounts, and family-friendly initiatives. Check out the full list on our staff benefits page (opens in a new tab) and use our reward calculator to discover the total value of your pay and benefits 

Championing equality, diversity and inclusion

The University of Edinburgh holds a Silver Athena SWAN award in recognition of our commitment to advance gender equality in higher education. We are members of the Race Equality Charter and we are also Stonewall Scotland Diversity Champions, actively promoting LGBT equality. 

Prior to any employment commencing with the University you will be required to evidence your right to work in the UK. Further information is available on our right to work webpages (opens new browser tab)

Key dates to note

The closing date for applications is 10 January 2025.

Unless stated otherwise the closing time for applications is 11:59pm GMT. If you are applying outside the UK the closing time on our adverts automatically adjusts to your browsers local time zone. 

The University is able to sponsor the employment of international workers in this role.  If successful, an international applicant requiring sponsorship to work in the UK will need to satisfy the UK Home Office’s English Language requirements and apply for and secure a Skilled Worker Visa.  

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