Senior AI Research Scientist

Remote
AI /
Full-time /
Remote
Ever wondered what the meaning is in the songs of whales, in the chirping of the birds in your garden, or in the ultrasonic communications of bats? You’re not alone…

Earth Species Project (ESP) is a non-profit research lab and impact organization dedicated to using AI to solve these questions. We believe the exponential progress we’re seeing in AI offers new ways of looking at the world and expanding the ability of human beings to learn from other species. Our hope is that this will make a significant contribution to altering human perspective on how we relate to the rest of nature.

ESP partners with biologists and machine learning researchers at leading universities and institutions around the world, and we are honored to be supported by many forward-looking philanthropists and groups, including the Paul G Allen Family Foundation and the National Geographic Society.

As the ability of AI to generate fluent human communication has advanced, so too has the public and scientific interest in what the potential of this technology might be for the animal domain. ESP’s work has been widely featured in the mainstream and scientific press over the past three years, from The Guardian to the New York Times, TIME magazine, Science, Scientific American, WIRED and the Financial Times.

Our dynamic global team is growing, and we are looking for a talented communications professional with exceptional strategic and storytelling skills to lead efforts to engage key target audiences in our work and to super-power our mission.

Purpose of role

You will join an incredible and global remote team, and will be responsible for developing pioneering research towards decoding and translating non-human communication, including extending unsupervised translation techniques and tackling cornerstone biological and computational problems on large-scale multimodal behavioral datasets.

You will work with biology and machine learning experts to create understanding from new scopes and scales of data.

Responsibilities

Senior AI Research Scientists are responsible for developing and applying techniques in machine learning, bioacoustics, and ethology, disseminating their work in both scientific publications, and collaborating on these efforts with other members of the AI team as well as with external biology partners. In addition to your scientific work, you will be responsible for communicating your results with the team at ESP, as well as with the general public through non-technical publications such as blog posts. As ESP is still a growing team, you will have the ability to help shape our long-term research agenda.

You will have flexibility in the research that you conduct towards ESP’s mission to decode non-human communication. 

Previous and ongoing research projects include:

- End-to-end source separation (i.e., separating simultaneous sound sources in an audio recording into individual tracks) and noise reduction for challenging bioacoustic data
- Use of self-supervised techniques to describe the vocal and behavioral repertoires of different animal species
- Developing generative models for vocalization generation and editing
- Developing large foundation models for application in bioacoustics

You will work with partners at various institutions including Cornell University, University of Oxford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California Santa Cruz, University of St. Andrews, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the Internet Archive, and the Jane Goodall Institute.

We are a fully remote team and you can be located anywhere in the world. This provides a good amount of flexibility, but you will occasionally be expected to participate in virtual meetings outside of typical working hours in your time zone. Additionally, you must have the willingness to travel internationally (<20%) for events and in-person team gatherings.

Your Background

We are open to traditional and non-traditional backgrounds.

Your areas of expertise might include: machine learning (deep learning, self-supervised learning, generative models, multimodal learning), natural language processing (unsupervised machine translation, language models), (computational) linguistics, bioacoustics, signal processing, data science, statistics, physics, or mathematics.

Additionally, you have experience in the following:

- Research: You have conducted or led research projects, your work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, and/or you’ve presented at scientific conferences
- Machine learning: You have a solid understanding of machine learning, math, statistics, probability theory, and computer science
- Programming: You have skills in Python and deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch or Tensorflow)

You might play a musical instrument, do long-distance running, enjoy teaching, knitting, wilderness trekking, or are an incredible parent. We’re excited about full human beings (and remain open to applications by qualified non-primates).