Research Associate

The School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh invites applications for a Research Associate position in conversational and interactive AI and related areas spanning natural language processing, machine learning, and information retrieval.  The aim is to make significant advances in large language models with applications to generative information retrieval and search-centric agents. The ideal candidate has in-depth knowledge of state-of-the-art neural language model architectures and reinforcement learning. 

 

The Opportunity:

The postdoctoral researcher will be supervised by Jeff Dalton and funded by a UKRI Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship in collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute on “Neural Conversational Information Seeking Assistants.” You will join the GRILL Lab (https://grilllab.ai) which is part of the Edinburgh NLP group (https://edinburghnlp.inf.ed.ac.uk/), one of the largest and most active AI research groups in the world (see http://csrankings.org/#/index?nlp&world). There are many collaborative opportunities, both within the group as well as across the School of Informatics (which includes faculty working on machine learning, computer vision, speech processing, and social computing). 

 

This post is fixed term (12 months) and full-time (35 hours per week); with regular on-campus working. 

The salary for this post is UE07 £40,247 to £47,874 per annum.

 

Your skills and attributes for success: 

- Ph.D. degree (or about to obtain one)
- A strong background in AI, preferably: informational retrieval and/or natural language processing
- Publications at top venues in IR, ML, or/and NLP
- Strong programming skills
- Experience with modern deep learning frameworks, preferably related to language model architectures
- Strong communication, presentation, and writing skills, and excellent command of English

 

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

 

For informal enquiries, please contact: jeff.dalton@ed.ac.uk 

Feedback is only provided to interviewed candidates.

 

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).

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.  

Key dates to note

The closing date for applications is 4 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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