"Postdoctoral Associate, Computer Science and/or Social Science"

One or more full-time Post-Doctoral Associate positions in computer science and/or social science, available starting approximately September 2023, for one year with the possibility of extension. Candidates will be appointed in the Center for Collective Intelligence and/or the Computer Science & AI Lab, as appropriate.

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. We will start by combining knowledge from computer science and the social sciences to create online taxonomies 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 team is led by Profs. Thomas Malone, Daniela Rus, and Abdullah Almaatouq.

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; 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 participate in manuscript writing, supervising students, presentation of research results, and other duties related to research.

REQUIRED: Ph.D. in Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning), Social Science (including Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, Economics, and others), Computational Social Science, Management, Organizational Behavior or other related fields; English language proficiency; excellent communication skills; and self-motivation.

DESIRABLE: Some familiarity with more than one of the above fields.

Please apply by uploading a CV and cover letter outlining interests and experience.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, ancestry, or national or ethnic origin. MIT’s full policy on Nondiscrimination can be found here.