Named in honour of Alan Turing, the Institute is a place for inspiring, exciting work and we need passionate, sharp, and innovative people who want to use their skills to contribute to our mission to make great leaps in data science and AI research to change the world for the better.

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Turing Lead, Adrian Weller, received a grant as Co-Investigator (Co-I) to be part of the EU Horizon European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI project (‘ELSA’). The goal of ELSA is to create a European virtual centre of excellence for safe and secure AI that will address major challenges hampering the deployment of AI technologies. Research will focus on “technical robustness and safety”, “privacy preserving techniques and infrastructures” and “human agency and oversight”.

Efforts to detect, prevent, and mitigate threats and enable recovery from harm focus on 3 grand challenges:

1. Robustness guarantees and certification
2. Private and robust collaborative learning at scale
3. Human-in-the-loop decision making: Integrated governance to ensure meaningful oversight

which cut across 6 use cases: health, autonomous driving, robotics, cybersecurity, multimedia, and document intelligence.

ELSA will focus on machine-learning-based methods and especially deep learning, which form the foundation for many modern AI applications. Throughout the project, robust technical approaches will be integrated with legal and ethical principles supported by meaningful and effective governance architectures to nurture and sustain the development and deployment of AI technology that serves and promotes foundational European values.

This project builds on and expands the internationally recognized network of excellence ELLIS, the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems. ELLIS is made up of a network of over 100 organizations and more than 300 ELLIS Fellows and Scholars (113 ERC grants) committed to shared standards of excellence.

For more details about the project, please see elsa: European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI (elsa-ai.eu).

ROLE PURPOSE

The Turing are hiring a Research Assistant to support the delivery of parts of the ELSA project for which Turing will be funded. The successful candidate will work with Turing Lead, Adrian Weller at the Turing and the other ELSA project partners.

The ideal candidate will contribute in one or more of the following ways: 1. Technical; 2. Law and Governance; 3. Ethics and Policy.

The project will develop new theory, methods and tools to help enable the secure and safe development and deployment of AI systems. An area of focus will be reliable tools for AI assurance to help monitor and enforce desired properties of systems in the context of ELSA project use cases, coordinating with legal expert Co-Investigators on the project, and partners to help develop technical solutions to ethical governance challenges raised. The research will work to advance developing robust measures of transparency for fairness, incorporating methods to ensure appropriate privacy is preserved, and exploring scalable approaches to incorporating human knowledge and priors in the loop for effective human-machine team decisions.

For the reason above, we welcome applications from candidates with expertise in any of the following: Mathematics, Computer Science, as well as Law, Ethics or Policy.

Within transparency, the primary focus is interpretability of the outputs of machine learning systems which will be directly beneficial for practitioners, stakeholders or regulators; though we shall also consider broader issues, such as the process of how data and humans fit into decision pipelines.

The candidate will join a vibrant team of researchers and will have opportunities to engage with cutting-edge projects and experts at leading universities. These include Karen Yeung (Birmingham), and project teams funded by other Turing strategic partnerships.

DUTIES AND AREAS OF RESPONSIBILITY

General duties for Research Assistant posts:

• Contribute to report writing, academic and other publications, and presentations and support in writing other outputs such as blogs, explainers, academic outputs
• Assist in communicating research outputs to diverse stakeholders, through conferences, events, meetings, and press opportunities as appropriate.
• Liaise with a network of internal and external contacts and key stakeholders to assist with the work of the research project as appropriate
• Work collaboratively with academic experts and broader research partners from across the Turing and the wider Turing community.
• Contribute to the life of the Institute and support a diverse and inclusive community through embracing the Turing values.
• Undertake required administration tasks
• Adhere to and promote principles of reproducible and ethical data science and ensure secure handling of data and health and safety in all aspects of work.

Specific to the project/programme role

• Support the development and application of state-of-the-art approaches for fairness, transparency, robustness and/or privacy to tackle real-world-inspired research challenges of the ELSA project. These might include:

1. Robust methods for practically useful transparency, examining the extent of leakage of private information
2. Appropriate methods to monitor and mitigate bias and unfairness
3. Ways to improve practical human-machine team performance
4. Formal verification and validation

• Masters degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Mathematics, Policy, Law, Ethics, or a closely related discipline
• A solid background in one or more of the following: technical approaches to fairness, transparency, robustness or privacy; probabilistic models; human-machine teams
• Experience in design, development and implementation of research software tools and libraries, such as Python, Java, GPU programming (Tensorflow, PyTorch, etc), symbolic verification (SAT, SMT)
• Hands-on experience with Machine Learning methods
• Experience of conducting academic research
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to clearly communicate complex or specialist information/research findings clearly and concisely
• Ability to present and communicate complex information and conceptual ideas to diverse audiences

APPLICATION PROCEDURE

If you are interested in this opportunity, please click the apply button below. You will need to register on the applicant portal and complete the application form including your CV and covering letter. If you have questions about the role or would like to apply using a different format, please contact us on 020 3862 3536 or email [email protected].

If you have questions about the role or would like to apply using a different format, please contact us on 020 3862 3536 or email [email protected].

If you are applying for more than one role at the Turing, please note that only one Cover Letter can be visible on your profile at one time. If you wish to apply for multiple roles and do not want to overwrite your existing Cover Letter, please apply for the role using the button below and forward your additional cover letter directly to [email protected] quoting the job title.

CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATIONS: SUNDAY 08 SEPTEMBER 2024 AT 23:59 (LONDON UK BST)

We reserve the right to close this vacancy early or to interview suitable candidates before the closing date if enough applications are received.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

This full-time post is offered on a fixed term basis until September 2025. The annual salary is £41,352 plus excellent benefits, including flexible working and family friendly policies, https://www.turing.ac.uk/work-turing/why-work-turing/employee-benefits

The Alan Turing Institute is based at the British Library, in the heart of London’s Knowledge Quarter. We expect staff to come to our office at least 4 days per month. Some roles may require more days in the office; the hiring manager will be able to confirm this during the interview.

EQUALITY, DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

The Alan Turing Institute is committed to creating an environment where diversity is valued and everyone is treated fairly.In accordance with the Equality Act, we welcome applications from anyone who meets the specific criteria of the post regardless of age, disability, ethnicity, gender reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy and maternity, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.

We are committed to making sure our recruitment process is accessible and inclusive. This includes making reasonable adjustments for candidates who have a disability or long-term condition. Please contact us at [email protected] to find out how we can assist you.

Please note all offers of employment are subject to obtaining and retaining the right to work in the UK and satisfactory pre-employment security screening which includes a DBS Check.

Full details on the pre-employment screening process can be requested from [email protected].