Research Associate 5

Louisiana State University•Goodwell, OK

59d•Onsite

About The Position

This position will be responsible for conducting and coordinating research for the federally funded project "Decision-Driven Information Distillation for Multi-Agent Autonomy" through studying how teams of autonomous agents operating under partial observability, limited memory, constrained communication, sensing uncertainty, and adversarial interference should filter, retain, represent, and share information so that downstream decisions remain effective and trustworthy.

Requirements

Master's degree in electrical engineering, robotics, computer engineering, mechanical engineering, systems and control, computer science, applied mathematics, computational mathematics.
2 years of relevant research experience.
Relevant experience may include work in autonomous systems, robotics, estimation and control, machine learning, data assimilation, sensor fusion, or scientific computing.
A Ph.D. in a related field may substitute for the required professional or research experience.

Nice To Haves

Ph.D in electrical engineering, robotics, computer engineering, mechanical engineering, systems and control, computer science, applied mathematics, computational mathematics, statistics, or a closely related field.
2 years of relevant research experience
Research experience in robotics, autonomous systems, multi-agent systems, or related simulation environments.
Experience with estimation, data assimilation, sensor fusion, control, or decision-making under uncertainty.
Experience applying machine-learning or probabilistic methods to sensor data, belief estimation, information selection, or communication.
Strong programming skills and experience developing reproducible computational experiments; experience with Python and tools such as PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, or C++ is beneficial
A record of research productivity appropriate to the candidate's career stage, together with strong communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively.
Depth in a complementary part of the project rather than across the full range of topics.
Candidates from engineering, robotics, computing, control, or computational mathematics backgrounds are encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities

Conduct research supporting autonomous multi-agent systems that must operate with incomplete observations, limited communication, constrained computing resources, and unreliable data.
Develop and evaluate methods that help agents determine which observations to retain, how to update mission-relevant beliefs, what information to store, and when to share information with teammates.
Adapt suitable estimation, control, machine-learning, and communication methods to the project's multi-agent object-search scenarios.
Implement these methods in a reproducible software framework and connect the information-processing components to a fixed downstream planner.
Build and extend computational multi-agent object-search environments formulated as POMDP or Dec-POMDP problems, with noisy multimodal observations, intermittent communication, spoofed sensor inputs, corrupted messages, communication denial, and dynamic risk fields.
Evaluate the resulting methods through numerical experiments, benchmark comparisons, and simulation studies in multi-agent POMDP environments, with emphasis on mission outcomes, belief quality, communication and memory use, robustness, scalability, and decision latency.
Review relevant research, software, and simulation tools as needed to support the project's technical development.
Integrate the project's filtering, belief-estimation, memory, communication, and decision-interface components into a reproducible computational framework.
Work with faculty, graduate students, and other project personnel to plan simulation studies, coordinate technical tasks, and support the development of the project's computational demonstrator.
Maintain simulation configurations, source-code repositories, software environments, model checkpoints, simulation logs, benchmark instances, and evaluation scripts needed for reproducibility.
Prepare peer-reviewed manuscripts, technical documentation, presentations, benchmark releases, software releases, and monthly, quarterly, or annual project reports as required.
Assist with project planning, milestone tracking, technical reporting, and the development of related research proposals.
Collaborate with the project team to translate theoretical and computational ideas into a validated simulation-based demonstrator for multi-agent autonomy.
Perform other research-related duties as assigned.