AI Research Assistant

University of Maryland•College Park, MD

3d•$23 - $50•Onsite

About The Position

The AI Research Assistant will assist the AI/Machine Learning lead for DE Bioeffects project in their efforts to develop and refine the AI/ML backed sensemaking technology for the repository. They will attend project meetings at the request of the PI, co-PIs, and AI/ML lead, and may be asked to take technical notes during meetings. They will maintain a collaborative work style and help the AI/ML lead solve problems with the large interdisciplinary research team.

Requirements

Currently enrolled in a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Doctoral degree program at an accredited college or university in Computer Science, Data Science, Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing, Information Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, or a closely related field.
Demonstrated hands-on experience — through coursework, research, internship, or a personal project — building and evaluating retrieval and language-model systems, including at least one retrieval system built end to end and at least one model the candidate trained or fine-tuned themselves.
Must be able to obtain a US security clearance.
Proficiency in Python, including the ability to write modular, re-runnable, and documented code.
Working familiarity with the Linux command line and with version control using Git.
Familiarity with at least one modern machine-learning or natural-language-processing toolkit — for example, PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, or sentence-transformers.
Ability to learn unfamiliar tools independently from documentation and example code, and to raise blockers promptly rather than working around them silently.
Ability to communicate clearly in writing, to work collaboratively as part of an interdisciplinary research team, and to use standard office productivity software.

Nice To Haves

Graduate-level study in Computer Science, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Information Science, or a related field.
Domain adaptation of retrieval models — fine-tuning an embedder or reranker on in-domain data; continued pretraining on a domain corpus.
Information extraction: NER, entity linking, relation extraction — including fine-tuning extraction models on a labeled gold set.
Knowledge graphs: building a citation/affiliation/funding graph and querying it; traversal, community detection; Neo4j or NetworkX.
GraphRAG, or a considered view on RAG vs. GraphRAG.
NLI / entailment or groundedness scoring.
Constrained or schema-guided decoding.
Multi-GPU or distributed training; experiment tracking.
Layout-aware PDF parsing and OCR.
REST API development (FastAPI / Flask); DevOps, CI/CD.
Comfort working independently and collaboratively in a fast-paced, evolving environment.
Strong organizational skills and attention to detail.
Active or eligible for a security clearance.

Responsibilities

Assist the AI/ML lead for DE Bioeffects project in developing and refining AI/ML backed sensemaking technology.
Attend project meetings as requested by PI, co-PIs, and AI/ML lead.
Take technical notes during meetings.
Maintain a collaborative work style.
Help the AI/ML lead solve problems with the interdisciplinary research team.