Job Description

Posted on 14 July 2023

Group: M3S

Project Overview

The "Mens, Manus and Machina\xe2\x80\x94How AI Empowers People, Institutions and Cities in Singapore (M3S)" project is driven by the goal of investigating the nature of work, redefining our relationship with technology, and exploring how institutions can adapt to foster livability, sustainability, innovation, and social welfare.

The Postdoctoral Associate is in the T6 project for the five-year M3S program in SMART. Successful applicants for this position will have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge, interdisciplinary projects that aim to dramatically rethink how people and AI systems will work together in the future. To do this, the project seeks to build a strong scientific foundation for how AI can augment (as opposed to replace) humans, and how humans can take advantage of the increased usefulness of AI systems across many tasks. We will start by combining knowledge from computer science and the social sciences to create online taxonomies of tasks and design space maps of many ways humans and AI systems can work together.

Then, using these knowledge bases, we will develop AI tools to automatically generate promising ways of combining humans and AI systems to perform different tasks. In the long run, we believe these tools will help rapidly (a) identify use cases for new AI capabilities, (b) specify effective processes and task allocations to humans and computers in a given situation, and (c) identify innovative ways to combine people and AI to solve business and societal problems.

The T6 team is led by distinguished scholars, including Profs. Thomas Malone, Daniela Rus, and Abdullah Almaatouq from MIT; and Profs. Marcelo Ang and Bryan Low from the National University of Singapore; and will be assisted by Prof. Archan Misra from Singapore Management University.



Depending on their own backgrounds, the Postdoctoral Associates will participate in one or more activities like the following:

-Developing content for the online knowledge bases by:

• Gathering and analyzing various kinds of data, such as research results from different disciplines or work activities in different organizations
• Designing questionnaires and field studies to help characterize the nature of jobs in partner organizations
• Making editorial decisions about what content to include and how to organize it

-Developing software tools for:

• Maintaining, browsing, and searching the online knowledge bases
• Using various collective intelligence methods to help groups make editorial decisions about content and organization of the knowledge bases
• Using the online knowledge bases to automatically generate promising ways of combining people and computers for performing various tasks

-Using human-subject experiments and other social science methodologies to study and improve all of the above activities

In general, we expect all Postdoctoral Associates to:

-Collaborate with the project team and other researchers to design, implement, and evaluate research projects.

-Publish research results in top-tier conferences and journals, and disseminate research findings through presentations and other means.

-Participate in the mentorship and training of graduate and undergraduate students at MIT and in Singapore.

-Assist in grant writing, project management, and other administrative duties related to research activities.

-Perform other duties as needed.

Job Requirements

-Ph.D. in Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning), Social Science (including Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, and Economics), Computational Social Science, Management, Organization Behavior, or other related fields by the start of the appointment

-Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

-Some familiarity with more than one of the above fields.

-Strong publication record in top-tier conferences and journals.

-Familiarity with statistical data analysis tools and techniques

Interested applicants are invited to send in their full CV/resume, cover letter and list of three references (to include reference names and contact information). We regret that only shortlisted candidates will be notified.

Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology