Research Assistant

The School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh invites applications for a Research Assistant position in natural language processing. The researchers will join a team working on efficient, large-scale multilingual data extraction and model-building.

 

The Opportunity:

The candidate will work within the Machine Translation group (https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/statmt), which is well known for developing open-source tools and data, running the WMT shared tasks, and has also had a leading role in the field of neural machine translation. It is a supportive group which has many alumni who have moved on to interesting positions in research and industry. We also have access to large GPU clusters and to a regular programme of seminars and workshops with internationally recognised experts. The MT group is within the Institute for Language, Cognition and Communication (https://web.inf.ed.ac.uk/ilcc/about-us) one of the largest research institutes in Europe in this field.

 

We are recruiting for a Horizon Europe project, High Performance Language Technologies – HPLT. This project is creating an open platform that trains reproducible high-quality machine translation systems and language models. We are gathering over a million GPU hours and 7 petabytes of data. Research in HPLT focuses on efficiency and models that apply to a wide range of languages. 

 

The successful candidates will be responsible for a programme which includes fundamental research into deep learning models. This is an exciting opportunity to work on internationally visible projects, collaborating with strong teams of academic and industrial partners.

This post is advertised as full-time (35 hours per week) however, we are open to considering part-time or flexible working patterns. We are also open to considering requests for hybrid working (on a non-contractual basis) that combines a mix of remote and regular on-campus working. The post is fixed term until 31st August 2025.

 

The salary for this post is UE06 £33,882 to £39,105 per annum.

 

Your skills and attributes for success: 

Essential

• An MSc (or equivalent) in a computer science, artificial intelligence, or a related discipline
• Background in machine learning and natural language processing,
• Strong programming skills, ideally including C++ or Python          

Desirable

• Relevant research experience: machine translation, efficient and very large-scale NLP, dialogue processing
• Experience with the deep learning toolkits
• Scientific publications

 

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

 

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).

On this occasion the University will not consider applicants requiring sponsorship for this role. International workers will therefore only be able to take up this role if they can demonstrate an alternative right to work in the UK. 

 

Key dates to note

The closing date for applications is 3 February 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. 

 

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