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Professor and co-principal investigator Najoung Kim https://najoung.kim/of the Boston University Department of Linguistics https://ling.bu.edu/ (with active affiliations in Computer Science https://www.bu.edu/cs/and Data Science https://www.bu.edu/cds-faculty/) is seeking a Postdoctoral Associate to join the Professor's TIN Lab in Fall 2024. The successful applicant will have a background in one of the following disciplines: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Science, or other relevant areas. The postdoctoral associate will work closely with the PIs (Najoung Kim, Boston University & Sebastian Schuster, UCL) and will be responsible for co-leading a collaborative research project minimally involving two PhD-level graduate students.
*Responsibilities* The postdoctoral associate’s primary responsibility is to lead a research project, the aim of which is to develop detailed evaluation protocols for AI technology applied to a consequential task of real-world complexity—specifically, AI in the domain of academic AI research—and to apply this evaluation to estimate the capacities of the current best models. We expect there to be a substantial system development component (for building the baselines) as well as a substantial human study design component (for a rigorous evaluation of the system outputs), where different expertise can be contributed by different members of the research team (minimally, two PIs, the postdoctoral associate, and two PhD-level graduate students).
The postdoctoral associate is also invited to engage with the broader academic community at BU, spanning Linguistics, Computer Science, and the Center for Computing & Data Sciences, and academic communities in Boston and New England. There will also be regular opportunities to connect with the community at UCL.
*Qualifications* The postdoctoral associate needs to hold a PhD degree at the start of their appointment. Hands-on experience in either: (1) building systems that use language models as a core component to solve complex tasks, or (2) leading human annotation efforts or human behavioral experiments is required.
Publications or prior research experience in one of the following topic areas are desired, but not required:
- Compositional generalization - Data-efficient training methods (e.g., BabyLM-scale) - Language model evaluation - General-purpose prompting techniques
*Location* The postdoctoral associate will be based in Boston University. They will be physically located in one of the office spaces in 621 Commonwealth Avenue or 665 Commonwealth Avenue, subject to space availabilities.
*Duration* This is a one-year position with the base expectation that it will renew for a second year, conditioned on satisfactory progress.
*Compensation* The 12-month compensation for this position will be $90K-100K USD, commensurate with experience.
*Application* Candidates must submit a CV, two pieces of their most significant research contribution, and contacts of two references at the time of application. We will only contact the reference writers for letters of recommendation when we decide to interview the candidate. Application materials should be uploaded as individual PDF files through Academic Jobs Online at https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/27426. We will give full consideration to applications received by April 15, 2024: two weeks from the job posting date. Afterwards, applications will be considered on a rolling basis until the position is filled.
Inquiries should be directed to najoung@bu.edu and s.schuster@ucl.ac.uk.