Research Fellow

Full Time Fixed Term until 29/03/2028

We are seeking an enthusiastic and experienced senior research fellow to work on a £1m EPSRC-funded project to develop human-centred AI methods that can support and enhance intelligence analysis for national security and defence. The ‘AiTASHA’ project (AI Intelligence Triage & Acquisition Support for Human-centred Analysis) aims to improve the speed and confidence of intelligence analysts’ assessments by building new AI tools that can work alongside human analysts.

Intelligence analysts are routinely required to make high-consequence, defensible assessments from vast, complex and uncertain datasets, to identify indicators and warnings of hostile or malicious activities. Analysts must make these assessments rapidly in a highly-pressured and resource-constrained environment, where they face difficult choices of what data to analyse first, and whether to gather additional intelligence, potentially at the cost of delay or increased risk. Addressing this challenge is becoming increasingly urgent as both the scale and complexity of intelligence datasets, as well as the threat posed to UK safety, are growing, and existing AI support tools primarily focus on the identification and visualisation of patterns within datasets, without due consideration of human understanding or context, defensibility, and representation of uncertainty. The goal of this ambitious project is to make fundamental advances that will together underpin and enable a future explainable, defensible AI system that can complement, rather than replace, the work of intelligence analysts; recommending which existing data should be prioritised for human review and which potential new data should be prioritised for acquisition. To address this challenge we will advance the state-of-the-art across multiple component disciplines; in explainable multi-modal deep learning models, in causal statistical models and in human-machine teaming and AI ethics.

You will conduct internationally-leading research in human factors with applications to intelligence analysis. This role will involve developing and applying methods for eliciting knowledge from expert analysts in order to encode understanding of their mental models into a machine learning model, using dynamic Bayesian networks to understand, propagate and reduce uncertainty in their assessments. The research will apply models of distributed situation awareness and ecological interface design techniques to develop a novel human-centred human-AI teaming model. You will also be working closely with colleagues in statistical / graphical modelling as well as AI ethics, and will therefore need to be conversant in these areas.

The role will be based at the University of Southampton as part of an interdisciplinary consortium on the AiTASHA project, which is led by the Alan Turing Institute and also includes the universities of Warwick, Cardiff and Dundee, working closely with UK government defence and national security partners. The successful candidate will join this vibrant and interdisciplinary team of researchers and will have frequent opportunities to engage with internal stakeholders and external government partners throughout the delivery of the project. During the project it is expected that they will work as part of a small tight-knit cohort of Early Career Researchers spanning the AiTASHA consortium universities.

This role it is a funder requirement that you are a UK National or have been residing the in the UK for 5 years or more, and be happy to be put forward for a Security Check clearance.

Please confirm the following information in your cover letter:

• Your current and any former nationalities
• That you have been residing in the UK for the past 5 years

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