Post-doctoral Research Associate in Socially Intelligent Robotic Systems

The post-doctoral researcher will join a team at King's College London in the context of the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON) project "SERMAS: Socially-acceptable Extended Reality Systems and Models". The team at King's comprises Dr. Oya Celiktutan (Department of Engineering), Prof. Luca Viganò and another postdoctoral researcher (both at the Department of Informatics). This is an exciting opportunity to join our team and participate in a new area of research, and in the process collaborate with our SERMAS partners in Italy, Germany, Ireland and Switzerland.
The SERMAS project aims to develop the next generation of interactive agents that can cooperate with and assist humans in a socially acceptable manner, with higher levels of autonomy. This requires novel approaches for multilevel analyses of human behaviour, for example, from their gestures to their emotions and personality, and multimodal synthesis of such behaviours via virtual agents/robots for system adaptation and personalization. The developed agents will be evaluated in real-world scenarios taking roles as receptionist, training coach, and office assistant.

The role holder will be highly experienced in machine learning applied to human behaviour analysis and synthesis via embodied agents and human-robot interaction, as well as have a strong publication record in related areas. The research will have a substantial multidisciplinary ambition, but a PhD in computer science, mathematics or engineering is essential.
This is a full-time post - 100% full-time equivalent. You will be offered a fixed term contract until the end of August 2025.
About you
To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:
Essential criteria
1. PhD in computer science, or related field.
2. Experience with machine learning applied to multimodal human behaviour and interaction analysis, as well as human-computer interaction.
3. Excellent publication record in high-quality journals and/or conference proceedings.
4. Excellent programming skills, particularly, Python and/or C/C++. Hands-on experience with deep learning libraries (e.g., PyTorch).
5. Ability to organise and prioritise work to meet deadlines with minimal supervision.
6. Excellent interpersonal/teamwork skills.
Desirable criteria
1. Experience in devising and developing novel machine learning algorithms.
2. Excellent mathematics skills.
3. Familiarity with managing project work packages and writing deliverables.

For further information about the Department of Engineering at King's, please see https://www.kcl.ac.uk/engineering/research.
The candidate will be a member of Social AI & Robotics Laboratory, please see https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/helping-robots-to-understand-people-the-work-of-the-social-ai-and-robotics-lab