Senior Research Associate / Research Fellow - Protecting Ordinary People from Deepfakes

The Department of Psychology at Lancaster University is seeking to appoint one full time Senior Research Associate (grade 7) or Research Fellow (grade 8), to work on the Protecting Ordinary People from Deepfakes Project. We are looking for a software/machine learning engineer (or similar) to work in an interdisciplinary team reporting to Dr Sophie Nightingale (Principal Investigator). 

The Project is funded by the UKRI ESRC/EPSRC as part of Dr Nightingale’s Future Leaders Fellowship for which we are hiring a research team to work on mapping and mitigating the threats to ordinary people from deepfake technology. As part of this team, we are seeking either 

• a Research Fellow to lead; or 
• a Senior Research Associate to contribute to leading:

the development of a forensically assured verification system to address the illegal use of deepfake technology to commit violence against women and girls through the creation of non-consensual intimate imagery. The successful candidate will be responsible for the development and day-to-day management of the system which will initially use face recognition technology. As such, the candidate will be expected to have excellent software engineering/computational skills as well as competence in handling sensitive and confidential data. The candidate will work closely with the Principal Investigator and other team members to integrate experimental findings and theory to develop new tools and techniques, and/or to evolve the development of the system. We will also engage in codesign with project partners, including the police, the public, and charities to ensure that the system is useful, usable, trusted, and sustainable.

We are looking for someone with experience in:

• software/machine learning engineering, 
• automated data collection (crawling, scraping, parsing), 
• and data management.  

Working closely with the Principal Investigator, the successful candidate at Research Fellow level will lead and mentor the research team on a day-to-day basis to ensure delivery of the Project objectives and research priorities across a large collaborative project. At either Senior Research Associate or Research Fellow level, you will engage with external project partners and stakeholders (including the media and general public), lead Project dissemination events, and represent the Project at conferences. 

The Psychology Department is a busy teaching and research active Department. It is home to a friendly group of around 40 Academic staff, with teams of Research and Professional Services and Technical staff. The Department supports a large cohort of Undergraduate, Masters and Postgraduate research students; and a wide range of research projects including several cross-institution grants. 

Further information is available at: http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk.

Please upload a cover letter with your application. In your cover letter please indicate if you are applying for the post at Senior Research Associate (grade 7) or Research Fellow (grade 8) level.

This is a full-time post, with ideally a November start date.

This role is indefinite, subject to funding, which is currently available until November 2028.

Informal enquiries are welcome and should be addressed to Dr Sophie Nightingale, Senior Lecturer, s.nightingale1@lancaster.ac.uk

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