The posting
COMPANY DESCRIPTION
Singapore Management University is a place where high-level professionalism blends together with a healthy informality. The 'family-like' atmosphere among the SMU community fosters a culture where employees work, plan, organise and play together - building a strong collegiality and morale within the university.
Our commitment to attract and retain talent is ongoing. We offer attractive benefits and welfare, competitive compensation packages, and generous professional development opportunities - all to meet the work-life needs of our staff. No wonder, then, that SMU continues to be given numerous awards and recognition for its human resource excellence.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- This position is for School of Computing and Information Systems (SCIS).
- Extend and maintain the lab's VR testbed (Unity front-end, Python back-end) integrating live speech recognition, eye tracking, hand tracking, and a scene-graph representation of the task environment.
- Implement an incremental multimodal reference resolver that fuses speech, gaze, and gesture into a continuously-updated belief distribution over candidate interpretations, meeting real-time latency requirements (less than 200ms end to end).
- Design and implement a library of in-situ visual overlays that render the agent's belief in VR, and integrate them with the communication policy developed by the Co-PI's team.
- Design, pilot, and run controlled lab user studies (between- and within-subjects, N≈24-48), including experiment scripting, instrumentation and logging of behavioural measures, participant recruitment and scheduling, and IRB documentation.
- Analyse quantitative (ANOVA, trust-calibration and error measures) and qualitative (interview, think-aloud) study data, and co-author submissions to CHI, UIST, DIS, CSCW, or HRI.
- Collect, annotate, and release an expanded public corpus of natural deictic instructions, including running elicitation sessions and maintaining the annotation scheme and documentation.
- Other duties as assigned.
QUALIFICATIONS
- Minimum Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Systems or closely related disciplines from a reputable institution of higher learning; with particular focus on Human-Robot Interaction.
- Minimum 1 year of relevant research experience in Human-Robot Interaction as a graduate student, research assistant or research engineer.
- Proficiency in programming software/languages such as C# and Python, and the Unity environment is required.
- Hands-on experience developing for VR head-mounted displays (e.g., Meta Quest, OpenXR), including eye- and hand-tracking input.
- Experience integrating real-time multimodal input pipelines (speech recognition, gaze, gesture) and/or LLM/VLM APIs into interactive systems.
- Proven track record and professional experience in interface prototyping, user experimental design.
- Demonstrated experience and know-how on academic research, literature survey, and academic manuscript preparation.
- Technical skills in designing robotic interaction techniques, driving robotic simulation studies, or robotic prototypes with novel interaction techniques for human-robot interaction.
- Technical skills with respect to user research design, and statistical analysis, and qualitative data analysis.
- Ability to break down complex problems and design effective solutions.
- Innovating new approaches and thinking outside the box.
- Applicants with research publications in the HCI or HRI area will be advantageous.
- Ability to work cooperatively as part of a small, agile academic research team is essential.
- Self-motivated individual who can work independently and collaboratively with team members.
OTHER INFORMATION
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Please note that your application will be sent to and reviewed by the direct employer - Singapore Management University
