Research Scientist

Description:

We are looking for a Research Scientist with strong experience in designing, implementing and analysing studies that measure human behaviour. At AISI, our research focuses on AI safety, so the post-holder will be involved in experimentation that measures the positive and negative impacts of AI systems on individuals and groups.

These could be psychological impacts, related to mental health (e.g. does interacting with models change mood or levels of anxiety) as well as epistemic health (are people more likely to believe fake news or subscribe to conspiracy theories after interacting with the models).

We are also very interested in how advanced AI systems may enhance human capabilities, especially in domains where this uplift may have dangerous consequences (e.g. biosecurity or cybersecurity).

The ideal candidate will have good coding and quantitative skills and be comfortable collecting data via online platforms.

Example duties on any given day could include:

• Co-designing a new study or developing relevant analysis tools
• Implementing new tasks in a relevant coding language
• Recruiting & briefing new participants and/or graders who evaluate participant responses
• Troubleshooting experiments before they are launched
• Launching experiments online and monitoring their progress
• Analysing the results of a study
• Giving presentations about your findings to interested parties, or writing reports for internal or external dissemination

Person specification

The ideal candidate will have skills and experience that allow them to:

• Lead end-to-end design and implementation of high-quality data collection pipelines that evaluate advanced AI systems with a focus on safety, fairness, and beneficial outcomes
• Carry out studies rigorously, ethically, safely, with both data quality and participant experience / wellbeing in mind
• Identify improvements to our evaluation process, for example by debugging, simplifying workflows or building new analysis tools
• Analyse data in ways that further research progress
• Coordinate closely with research and engineering partners in your team to design new methods and build the instruments that enable high-quality data collection at scale, with a focus on AI alignment
• Clearly communicate insights from studies to influence research decisions across stakeholders