The National Institute of Education invites suitable applications for the position of Research Assistant on an 18-month contract at the Learning Sciences and Assessment Department.

Project Title: Open emotion learner modeling to improve machine predictions and improve human metacognition

Project Introduction:

We are hiring a Research Assistant for an 18-month project focused on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help students learn better by managing their emotions. The project tackles two main issues:

• Making AI Better at Reading Emotions: Current AI models often miss the real-world context of emotions in a classroom. We will build a new system that gets human feedback over time. This feedback will help the AI learn and make more accurate emotional guesses as it goes.

• Helping Students Understand Their Emotions: Students often don't know how to handle their feelings when tasks get hard. We will design special "Open Emotional Learner Models" (OELMs) – like profiles that show students their emotional patterns. These profiles are meant to encourage students to think about and manage their feelings better. We will test different ways for students to interact with these profiles (just view them, edit them, or get suggestions from them) to see which way helps them the most.

Our main idea is that when the AI struggles to “detect” an emotion, we use that struggle as a chance to help the student learn about their own social and emotional skills. By having students correct or refine the AI's model, we create a helpful exchange between the student and the machine.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s Degree in relevant discipline (e.g., computer science, data science, software engineering)
• Proficient in Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Python, Data Science, and AI/ML Toolkits

Preferred

• Applicants with Master’s or PhD Degree in relevant discipline
• Strong Practical experiences in machine learning and software development

Responsibilities:

• Build and improve Al models for multimodal emotion inference (using audio, video, etc.)
• Implement reinforcement learning algorithms that process human feedback into the AI Models to improve them with time
• Any other administrative duties as assigned by Principal Investigators

Application

Applicants (external and internal) will apply via Workday. We regret that only shortlisted candidates will be notified.

Closing Date

Closing date for advertisements will be set to 14 calendar days from date of posting.

Hiring Institution: NIE