PREP0004138 Search, NLP & Generative AI Evaluation Researcher

PREP Research Associate

Opportunity No.: PREP0004138

This position is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Professional Research Experience (PREP) program. NIST recognizes that its research staff may wish to collaborate with researchers at academic institutions on specific projects of mutual interest, and thus requires that such institutions must be the recipient of a PREP award. The PREP program requires staff from a wide range of backgrounds to work on scientific research in many areas. Employees in this position will perform technical work that underpins the scientific research of the collaboration.

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Search, NLP & Generative AI Evaluation Researcher

Project Description:

The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Information Technology Laboratory is seeking a qualified candidate to support the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC, trec.nist.gov). TREC evaluates AI technologies in information retrieval (IR), search, natural language processing, and multimedia search, creating human-labeled data to measure effectiveness. TREC hosts annual evaluations & workshops, releasing datasets and research papers upon completion. The candidate for this position will work alongside world-class researchers at NIST.

Key Responsibilities: 

• Develop software for topic creation, relevance assessment, and generative output annotation
• Develop scoring software for evaluation outputs
• Develop and maintain systems used to register, submit outputs, and see evaluation results
• Conduct research on evaluating information access systems, including but not limited to:
  • Automate the evaluation of AI-generated outputs
  • Leverage human insight and expertise with AI support for data annotation and evaluation
  • Design metrics for AI-generated outputs in information-seeking contexts
  • Interfaces for annotating data that support consistency and identify errors
  • Quality control processes for data annotation
  • Leaderboard designs that support cooperative research instead of competition

Desired Qualifications: 

• U.S. Citizen preferred
• Ph.D. degree in Computer Science
• 5+ years of relevant experience
• Experience building systems with large language models as components
• Familiarity with Docker and Git
• Experience with Python, JavaScript, and web frameworks such as React and Django
• Ability to develop prototypes of tools needed to analyze data
• Strong oral and written communication skills
• Experience in conducting large-scale IR & multimedia retrieval evaluations
• Experience with ElasticSearch, Pyserini, or Terrier (open-source IR research platforms)

Other Details:

• Full-time: the participant is expected to work 40 hours a week
• Location: the participant will work at the NIST Gaithersburg Campus.
• Duration: this is expected to be a one-year position. Extensions are sometimes granted depending on the availability of funds.
• For questions related to the research project or the nature of the work in this position, please contact Dr. Ian Soboroff ( ian.soboroff@nist.gov). For questions related to the online application or NIST PREP more generally, please contact msu-nistprep@morgan.edu.

Privacy Act Statement

Authority: 15 U.S.C. § 278g-1(e)(1) and (e)(3) and 15 U.S.C. § 272(b) and (c)

Purpose: The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) hosts the Professional Research Experience Program (PREP) which is designed to provide valuable laboratory experience and financial assistance to undergraduates, post-bachelor’s degree holders, graduate students, master’s degree holders, postdocs, and faculty.

PREP is a 5-year cooperative agreement between NIST laboratories and participating PREP Universities to establish a collaborative research relationship between NIST and U.S. institutions of higher education in the following disciplines including (but may not be limited to) biochemistry, biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, engineering, electronics, materials science, mathematics, nanoscale science, neutron science, physical science, physics, and statistics. This collection of information is needed to facilitate the administrative functions of the PREP Program.

Routine Uses: NIST will use the information collected to perform the requisite reviews of the applications to determine eligibility, and to meet programmatic requirements. Disclosure of this information is also subject to all the published routine uses as identified in the Privacy Act System of Records Notices: NIST-1: NIST Associates.

Disclosure: Furnishing this information is voluntary. When you submit the form, you are indicating your voluntary consent for NIST to use the information you submit for the purpose stated.