NLP Research Scientist (Open Rank)

Are you passionate about solving big scientific problems in education through innovative technology and working in a highly multi-disciplinary collaborative environment? Would you like to know more about how computer vision, affective computing and machine learning are helping create new forms of learning and assessment tools? If this sounds intriguing, then we'd like to talk to you about a role as part of a new ACTNext, ACT R&D team tackling a set of problems requiring significant innovation.

Responsibilities

This position is located in Denver, Colorado or Iowa City, Iowa; but can also be filled remotely.

ACTNext, ACT's R&D arm, has an opening for a Principal NLP Research Scientist in the AI and Machine Learning group. This newly established group is pursuing cutting edge multidisciplinary research in creating a new generation of learning and assessments targeting modern educational paradigms including adaptive learning, educational content development, educational games and various forms of behavioral and in vivo assessments. We are conducting research on using rich multi-sensory data including audio and video and recent advances in NLP, computer vision, affective computing, psychometric analysis and cognitive science to build some of most advanced dynamic models for educational assessment in authentic, real-world scenarios. This is an excellent opportunity to be a part of a research and development team and make an impact with innovative education technology.

ESSENTIAL JOB RESPONSIBILITIES

Typical work-related activities include: 

• Identify, lead, pursue or collaborate in interdisciplinary projects, transferring techniques to a new context or connecting scientific fields that are usually separate and design creative solutions to challenging problems. Successful candidates are self-motivated and self-driven.
• Drive and/or participate in cutting edge research in language technologies, multimodal analytics and ground breaking innovations in education technology.
• Apply scientific knowledge to analyze data, perform statistical analyses, identify problems, devise solutions and construct methodologies, including metrics and best practices, and conduct experiments to validate these.
• Impact product development while working on and further developing a long-term research roadmap.
• Identify, lead and/or participate in dissemination activities through the publications of research papers in peer review journals

Qualifications

Education: 

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics or related field required
• PhD desirable
• Or an equivalent combination of education and experience from which comparable knowledge and abilities can be acquired 

Experience:

Principal Level

• A minimum of 10 years of progressively responsible experience that includes multigenerational research
• Extensive experience using cloud computing for machine learning and deep learning frameworks such as AWS SageMaker, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, etc.
• Expertise in machine learning, deep learning (RNNs, LSTM, CNN etc.), evaluation and / or optimization techniques
• Expertise in coding and software development utilizing Python and or R, Java, C, C++
• Experience in educational simulations and games are a plus 

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Strong knowledge of speech, and natural language processing as it relates to machine and deep learning
• Publication record in the top-tier international research venues in NLP, Machine Learning, Computer Vision and related areas
• Results-oriented, innovative, self-motivated and self-driven
• Possess solid hands-on skills in sourcing, cleaning, manipulating, analyzing, visualizing and modeling of real data
• A passion for making sense of user behavior, using any available methods
• Creative problem-solver, passionate about digging into complex problems and devising new approaches to reach results
• Demonstrated ability to work independently and as part of a team
• Strong communication and presentation skills required
• Demonstrated ability to lead initiatives, influence others and drive change
• Demonstrated ability to build relationships and work collaboratively
• Ability to coach and mentor others