Research Fellow (Citizen-Centric AI)

You will work on an exciting project on Citizen-Centric AI Systems. This project is funded via a £1.4M UKRI Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship that supports world-leading AI research.

The vision of this project is to develop AI systems with people at their heart. These citizen-centric AI systems learn the preferences of individual users to provide personalised services, advice and incentives in important application areas such as smart transportation, energy and disaster response. To ensure trustworthiness, these systems safeguard privacy by learning and making decisions locally, for example on a user's smart device.

Depending on your background, you may work on one or both of these areas:

The project has the strong support of a unique consortium of industrial stakeholders, including companies such as IBM Research, Yunex Traffic / Siemens Mobility, Jaguar Land Rover, Dstl and Thales. These will interact with you regularly to ensure your work helps address real societal challenges. Such interactions will include regular meetings, workshops and joint work on papers.

To be successful you will have (or be within 6 months of completion) a PhD (or professional qualifications and experience) in computer science or artificial intelligence. You have the ability to publish and present your work at top international venues, and you are passionate about working with stakeholders and end users to generate real impact from your research.

Applications will be considered from candidates who are working towards or nearing completion of a relevant PhD qualification. The title of Research Fellow will be applied upon completion of PhD. Prior to the qualification being awarded the title of Senior Research Assistant will be given.

This role will be offered on a full time, fixed term basis for 24 months.

About Us

You will join the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group within the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at Southampton. We are one of the world's leading groups in multi-agent systems research, and you will benefit from our significant research networks, such as the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub, the Alan Turing Institute, and the MINDS CDT. In the REF 2021, Computer Science at Southampton was rated 100% world-leading (4*) for both impact and environment.

We highly value diversity in our teams, and we particularly encourage women, Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME), LGBT+ and disabled applicants to apply for this position. ECS is committed to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, and we hold an Athena SWAN Bronze Award. We give full consideration to applicants who wish to work flexibly and those who have taken a career break. The University has a generous maternity policy (subject to qualifying criteria) and onsite childcare facilities.

For informal enquiries about this position, please contact Dr Sebastian Stein ( ss2@ecs.soton.ac.uk ).

We aim to be an equal opportunities employer and welcome applications from all sections of the community.