Research Intern AI for Scientific Discovery (Biomedical)

Machine Learning, AI for Science

Internship

Tokyo

General Information

Sony AI is seeking a research intern (PhD and Postdoc level) with expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and closely related areas to join our AI for Science team. The internship requires a minimum of 3-months duration. During the internship, you will be paired with mentors and work with them closely on all aspects of research, from defining research problems to developing new ML solutions to presenting your findings at top publication venues. Within the vast area of AI for Scientific Discovery, your project will address open questions in the application area of Biomedical Science, providing you with a lot of creative flexibility to explore things and learn. 

Roles and Responsibilities

• Carry out research contributing to the development of novel, practically relevant approaches to generating biomedical hypotheses based on scientific literature.
• Represent AI for Science and/or Biomedical Science as your areas of expertise – and corresponding work package(s) within a bigger project – and coordinate with other stakeholders (researchers and engineers) towards the overall project success.
• Participate in project calls, write reports and give presentations for internal audiences.
• Write code to support research, usually in Python.  
• Write papers for and give presentations at academic conferences.
• Closely collaborate with colleagues in Japan, Spain, and Switzerland

Required Qualifications and Skills

• Postgraduate research experience in computer science (or equivalent in education and experience) with focus on AI/ML and significant engagement with AI for Science and/or Biomedical Science as application domain.
• Plus: Prior degree in Biomedical Science (or the life sciences more generally)
• Experience with applied NLP (including one or several of the following: relation extraction, document retrieval, text representation)
• Experience programming in Python (including experience with AI/ML/NLP libraries such as PyTorch or spaCy)
• Plus: Experience with software-architecture and clean-coding best practices.
• Passion for making AI work in realistic domains.

Other Required Knowledge

• The ability and the willingness to work with research scientists and engineers in an ambitious research project with several unknowns, developing mutual understanding and a joint culture.
• The ability to deliver on tight deadlines and adapt to evolving or changing requirements.
• The ability and the willingness to work as a member of a distributed team spanning several time zones and bringing together people from diverse cultural and personal backgrounds.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills in English, as well as interpersonal skills including the ability to articulate to both technical and non-technical audiences

Working Location

Tokyo