Chancellor's Fellow in Human-Like Computing/Software Engineering

Closing date: 11 April 2016

Applications are invited for a Chancellor’s Fellowship in Human-like Computing and/or Software Engineering in the School of Informatics, at The University of Edinburgh. Appointment will be at UE grade 8 or, for an exceptional candidate, at UE grade 9.

The successful candidate will have a PhD and will be an established researcher in Human-like Computing and/or Software Engineering with a recent record of outstanding publications, along with a sound understanding of the potential non-academic impacts of the research and ways of engaging in order to achieve these. Experience of international collaboration and/or working in an internal research environment is desirable.

The Chancellor’s Fellow awards are aimed at early independent research career individuals of the highest potential who have begun to establish a reputation for the quality of their research at the forefront of their discipline and who have a commitment to teaching and student support at university level. The tenure-track Fellowship is held for five years. The initial focus will be on developing the Fellow’s research, whilst incrementally moving towards a standard academic workload, including teaching and administrative duties. Subject to satisfactory review at the end of year three, the Fellow will then move to an open-ended contract.

Appointment will be at UE grade 8 (£38,896 - £46,414) or, for an exceptional candidate, at UE grade 9 (£49,230 - £55,389). 

Human-like Computing

Human-like Computing refers to Artificial Intelligence that aims to emulate and/or complement human intelligence. Unlike intelligent systems that achieve human-level intelligence at isolated tasks, human-like AI systems should be able to communicate and collaborate with humans and be understandable for humans in order to support human activity effectively, and for the benefit of humans. Development of human-like computing capabilities is likely to make use of various research areas such as common-sense reasoning, collaborative cognition, mixed-initiative planning and learning, meaning-based computation, human-machine teamwork, collective intelligence and crowdsourcing, computational creativity, integration of heterogeneous reasoning processes, representational change, etc. Candidates' expertise can have either a theoretical or practical focus in any of these (or related) areas, but should involve a clear element of investigating interactions and/or similarities between artificial intelligent systems and human users.

Software engineering

Excellent candidates in any area of software engineering are encouraged to apply. The School's existing research in software engineering includes mathematical aspects of model-driven development, automated test generation, quality metrics, energy-aware software design, security engineering, and work on verification of software. However, candidates need not work in one of these aspects of software engineering; their software engineering work might, instead, build new connections with other research in the School, for example, Artificial Intelligence. We would be particularly interested to hear from candidates who consider that their work lies in the intersection of Human-like Computing and Software Engineering.

Further information / to apply

For further details and to apply, visit the the official University vacancy page via this link.

Informal enquiries to Dr Michael Rovatsos (for Human-like Computing) or Professor Perdita Stevens (for Software Engineering).