TuringHAT Research Fellow

Salary:

Full time starting salary is normally in the range £34,980 to £44,263 with potential progression once in post to £46,974

Contract Type:

Fixed Term contract up to December 2026

Background

The University of Birmingham’s School of Computer Science, in collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute, is offering a 3-year Research Fellowship on a project exploring human-agent teaming. In the 2021 UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) review of University research, Computer Science at University of Birmingham was ranked 3rd. The Alan Turing Institute is the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence.

Role Summary

The Research Fellow (RF) will work for 36 months. This project will explore the decision-making of individual agents and humans, and, in particular, the decision-making in teams. The focus of this project is to study how agents and humans exhibit different degrees of cooperation. In order to do so, the decision-making is modelled through various forms of Reinforcement Learning. In particular, this project seeks to deploy novel approaches to Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning. Teams could involve combinations of humans (with varying knowledge of the problem domain) and agents (with varying functionality). The goal is to explore the conditions under which optimal combinations of humans and agents can cooperate to respond to dynamic decision environments.

Main Duties

The responsibilities may include some but not all of the responsibilities outlined below.

• The RF will collaborate with other work packages (run from the Alan Turing Institute), as required, in the project. 
• The RF will support human in the loop experiments.
• The RF will develop Reinforcement Learning models that emulate human decision-making.
• The RF will work with a PhD student on the project (investigating explainable AI in Human-Agent Teams).
• The RF will contribute to the definition of use-cases for the project and to the design of human in the loop experiments that explore these use cases.
• The RF will support the collection and analysis of data from participants in the human in the loop experiments, e.g., developing team-based simulations and games in Open Gym, setting up Tobii eyetracking and managing data collection from this.
• The RF will contribute to research publications and present work to scientific meetings.

Person Specification

• First degree in computer science or engineering and normally, a higher degree (or one near to completion) relevant to research area or equivalent qualifications
• High level analytical capability
• Ability to communicate complex information clearly
• Fluency in relevant programming languages, analytical methods and ability to contribute to developing new ones
• Ability to assess resource requirements and use resources effectively 
• Understanding of and ability to contribute to broader management/administration processes
• Contribute to the planning and organising of the research programme and/or specific research project
• Co-ordinate own work with others to avoid conflict or duplication of effort
• Knowledge of the protected characteristics of the Equality Act 2010, and how to actively ensure in day to day activity in own area that those with protected characteristics are treated equally and fairly

Informal enquires can be made to Christopher Baber, email: c.baber@bham.ac.uk 

To download the full job description and details of this position and submit an electronic application online please click on the 'Apply' button above.

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