Job Description

We are seeking a highly qualified post-doctoral researcher in NLP with interests and experiences in building large language models (LLMs) and specialized conversational systems  to support next-generation human experience over long-term encounters with personified social robots. We are particularly interested in advancing algorithms and technical systems with applications in education (K12 and workforce) and healthcare with personalized, conversational pedagogical agents. The successful candidate will have a Ph.D. in computer science or a related field, with a strong background in natural language processing and machine learning. The successful candidate will work in a multi-disciplinary, collaborative, and dynamic research environment and will have opportunities to work on cutting-edge research projects in the field of conversational AI. If you are a highly motivated researcher with a passion for neural conversational systems, we encourage you to apply.

Responsibilities

As a post-doctoral researcher with a focus on neural conversational systems, your responsibilities will include:

• Conducting independent and collaborative research in the field of conversational AI, with a focus on developing novel approaches to building and deploying neural conversational systems in different contextual areas but with an emphasis on education and healthcare;
• Publishing research papers in top-tier conferences and journals;
• Making public presentations at research conferences and other fora;
• Collaborating with other graduate students, researchers and engineers to design and develop innovative conversational AI systems, such as embodied conversational agents;
• Collecting data sets for training new models;
• Designing evaluation studies, collecting and analyzing study data for research projects;
• Participating in grant-writing and fundraising efforts to support research projects;
• Mentoring and advising graduate students and junior researchers;
• Staying up-to-date with the latest research and trends in the field of conversational AI and related areas of research, such as natural language processing, large language models,  machine learning, and human-agent interaction.

Overall, you will be expected to work independently and as part of a team to advance the state-
of-the-art in neural conversational systems, while also contributing to the broader research goals of the research group.

Supervision Received:

General supervision by Prof. Breazeal

Supervision Exercised:

None

Qualifications

REQUIRED:

• Completed a Ph.D. thesis in neural conversational systems or closely related areas and have published in top-tier conversational AI venues, such as EMNLP, ACL, NAACL, IJCAI, ICLR, NeurIPS, AAAI, etc;
• Have a good understanding of human-in-the-loop NLP and human-centered tasks;
• Have excellent coding skills in modeling and conversational interface design for real-time interaction (e.g. proficient knowledge of PyTorch/TensorFlow and Python);
• Have experiences or interests in deploying conversational systems in real-world applications.

PREFERRED:

Interests or experiences in the following topics:

• Multi-modal connections to generative language models;
• Personalized LLM;
• Persona-based LLM;
• LLM with/for RL planning;
• Familiarity with the work of the MIT RAISE Initiative, including the MIT App Inventor and Personal Robotics Groups;
• Ethical or interactive limitations in Current LLM systems;
• Social emotional reasoning using language;
• Language grounding in social interactions;
• Multi-person dialog;
• Bilingual/Multilingual problems (Cultural, Linguistics & Interaction);
• Neuro-symbolic or knowledge graph based systems;
• Interests in developing graduate-level seminars/courses to teach the design, computational approaches, development, and ethical usage with neural-based conversational agents.

This is a one-year appointment with the possibility of extension based on funding and the course of the research.

To apply, please visit MIT's careers at https://hr.mit.edu/careers  and search for job ID number #22542