Research Associate
Research Associate
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Job Description
UE07: 40497..00 Per Annum.
CSE / School of Informatics.
Fixed Term Contract January 2029.
Full Time 35 Hours Per Week.
The School of Informatics University of Edinburgh invites applications for a PostDoctoral Research Associate in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to work with Dr Pasquale Minervini in the Edinburgh NLP Group a worldleading research group in Natural Language Processing. The project is funded by the AI Hub in Generative Models. The researcher will work on projects involving the evaluation and improvement of multimodal foundation models.
The Opportunity:
The School of Informatics is one of the largest research centres in Computer Science in Europe and is ranked #1 in the UK in terms of research power by a large margin. The Edinburgh NLP Group is consistently ranked among the worlds leading research groups in Natural Language Processing. We offer an exciting opportunity to work in an interdisciplinary collaborative friendly and supportive environment that integrates various fields of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) have significantly advanced Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision by providing more accurate solutions for a wide variety of problems ranging from visual question answering to image captioning object detection and image generation. These models integrate textual and visual data allowing them to understand and generate contextaware responses based on both modalities. VLMs have been successfully applied in numerous domains including autonomous driving robotics healthcare diagnostics and content moderation. Still VLMs have significant limitations particularly when tasked with interpreting complex semantic and spatial relationships between objects in an image. For example they struggle with reading clocks and calendars where precise spatial arrangements and symbolic meanings must be accurately inferred to extract meaningful information. This project aims to explore develop and benchmark strategies for improving the accuracy and reliability of VLMs when processing complex multimodal inputs.
We welcome both local (UKresident) and international applicants. This position includes funding for international travel e.g. for attending conferences visiting research collaborators and disseminating research findings. The researcher will have access to the HPC infrastructure and office spaces available to the School of Informatics and the Edinburgh NLP Group.
We are strongly committed to offering everyone an inclusive and nondiscriminating working environment. We warmly welcome qualified candidates from all backgrounds to apply and particularly encourage applications from underrepresented groups in the field.
Your skills and attributes for success:
- PhD (or near completion) in Natural Language Processing Computer Vision Machine Learning or a related discipline.
- Experience and evidence of effective independent research work within an interdisciplinary team. More broadly demonstrated ability to plan and execute a research project solve problems independently and make original contributions to a research field.
- Demonstrated quality of research performance as evidenced by highquality publications in toptier ML and NLP venues (e.g. ACL EMNLP NAACL ICML NeurIPS ICLR AAAI IJCAI WWW KDD ICDM and relevant journals).
- Strong programming skills; experience with Python NLP and deep learning libraries (e.g. Hugging face Transformers PyTorch Jax).
- Ability to communicate complex information clearly orally and in writing in English.
Click to view a copy of the full job description(opens new browser tab)
Please ensure you include the following documents in your application:
CV
Cover letter
The School of Informatics
The School of Informatics was ranked #1 in the UK for research power in Computer Science and Informatics in the Times Higher Education ranking based on the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). The School is one of the largest in Europe with more than 120 academic staff and a total of over 500 postdoctoral researchers research students and support staff. We have strong links with industry with dedicated business incubator space and wellestablished enterprise and business development programmes. The School is an active Unit in the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and one of the five founding partners of the UKs Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. This gives rise to opportunities to interact with PhD students research fellows and senior researchers within the Alan Turing Institute. Close to the School the University of Edinburgh has recently established the Bayes Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and the Edinburgh Futures Institute providing loci for fruitful multidisciplinary research and industry collaboration.
The City
Edinburgh is an attractive city: it is walkable with proximity to nature and features a worldclass cultural scene that includes attractions such as theEdinburgh International Festivalor theEdinburgh Fringe. Edinburgh was ranked 1st in the 2022TimeOut Indexof the best cities in the world. Their ranking factored in everything from scenic beauty community spirit public transport walkability restaurants through to cleanliness.
Contact details for enquiries: Dr Pasquale Minervini
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 familyfriendly initiatives. Check out the full list on ourstaff 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 ourright to work webpages(opens new browser tab)
Key dates to note
The closing date for applications is 7 April 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 Offices English Language requirements and apply for and secure a Skilled Worker Visa.
Required Experience:
IC
Employment Type
Full-Time
