Research Associate in Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Vehicles

Fixed term contract - 2 years

Full time - 35 hours per week

The opportunity:

This post will be part of the Centre for AI for Assistive Autonomy, a mission-driven research centre established using a UKRI Turing AI World Leading Researcher Fellowship awarded to Prof Subramanian Ramamoorthy.

The post-holder will be the lead researcher anchoring laboratory activities in the area of Artificial Intelligence for autonomous vehicles, with a focus on human-centred settings including shared autonomy and autonomous operation in crowded urban environments. This represents one of the main application themes within the centre, alongside assistive technology in healthcare domains. This work benefits from parallel work of a foundations team, whose focus will be on fundamental investigations into generative modelling of the full stack of human behaviour, from sensorimotor control to higher level cognitive decision making, to enable the development of person-centred and teachable autonomous systems.

The central purpose of the job is to investigate human-centred AI methods to enable novel applications including shared autonomy and autonomous operation in crowded urban environments.

This work builds on an established track record with autonomous systems that been deployed in field trials within Five (a Bosch company). Following this earlier work and an equipment donation to establish new laboratory facilities, this post holder will be a crucial part of a new initiative within the university to explore emerging issues for next generation mobility systems. With the support of three research engineers who are part of this laboratory, we are undertaking efforts to create a novel Edinburgh dataset focussed on driving in dense urban environments, a resource that will be available for the post holder to build on.

The candidate is expected to take intellectual ownership of core scientific questions in this space, developing new ideas and driving collaborative projects towards significant publications, leveraging the expertise of the supervision team and other scientific collaborators.

It is also expected that the post holder will contribute to the development of new assets in the form of experimental robotic systems and demonstrators. These will be expected to make use of data and model assets created by other Centre researchers.

Your skills and attributes for success:

Essential:

• A PhD (or near completion) in AI and/or robotics, with a focus on autonomous vehicles applications
• An excellent track record of publications in top-tier journals (e.g. IEEE Trans. or broad-interest science venues) and/or conferences in AI (e.g. IJCAI, AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR), robotics (e.g. R:SS, CoRL, ICRA), or allied areas
• Excellent proven experience of developing field robotics systems
• Ability to work effectively as part of a team, to meet deadlines, and to report on project progress
• Ability to communicate complex information clearly, orally and in writing

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