Research Associate

Full-time: 35 hours per week          

Fixed-term: for 18 months

The Opportunity:

The School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh invites applications for a 1.5-year Post-Doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) to do research on benchmarking sparse, reasoning, and agentic foundation models, under the supervision of Dr Edoardo Ponti and Dr Luo Mai.

The project is fully funded by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA)’s Scaling Compute: AI at 1/1000th the cost (TA 4 Benchmarking) £2M project. As part of this project, we aim to create a suite of next-generation benchmarks that track the fast-evolving landscape of AI, and measure the complex trade-offs across costs, accuracy, and performance on a range of state-of-the-art hardware. This project holds promise to open new avenues in developing and deploying AI models that are fast, environmentally friendly, and energy efficient.

The PDRA will be part of Edinburgh Informatics, which is ranked among the top groups in Europe for AI/ML/NLP research according to CSRankings. The PDRA will be supervised by Dr Edoardo Ponti and Luo Mai and collaborate with other team members based at Edinburgh, Imperial, and EPCC, one of the UK leading supercomputing centres.

The PDRA role involves 1) conducting cutting-edge research in efficient LLM/VLM architectures; and 2) assisting the project team with benchmarking different workloads of foundation on a variety of hardware.

This position includes funding for international travel to attend conferences and offers access to our HPC infrastructure. The position is open to UK and international applicants, with visa sponsorship available. 

This position is advertised as full-time (35 hours per week). We are also open to considering requests for hybrid working (on a non-contractual basis) that combines a mix of remote and regular on-campus working. 

People have always been at the heart of our work. As part of the University, you are a part of our community. We are looking for people with drive, determination, and a passion for what they do. We are a place where everyone is welcome and offer a range of policies and benefits designed to support you in building the right meaningful/personalised flexibility for you.

Your skills and attributes for success: 

• A PhD (or near completion) in NLP, ML, MLSys, or related areas of computer science, engineering, or mathematics. 

The following criteria are not strict yes/no requirements; rather, candidates will be assessed on the strength of their experience and evidence across these areas. Recruitment will aim to select the candidates demonstrating the strongest overall profile.

• Track record of research excellence, evidenced by e.g. preprints and publication record.
• Experience in implementation, training, and deployment of foundation models (LLMs and VLMs), evidenced by e.g. projects on Github. 
• Familiarity with AI hardware and ability to track cost and performance metrics.
• Ability to work in a large team.

Contact details for enquiries:

Edoardo Ponti (eponti@ed.ac.uk) and Luo Mai (luo.mai@ed.ac.uk)

A career with us has a range of other benefits that can be tailored to your lifestyle: 

• Professional development and subject matter expertise
• Leading-edge research
• Contributing to the work and purpose of the University.

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