Principal Researcher - Montréal, Canada - Microsoft

Microsoft

Verified Company

Montréal, Canada

1 week ago

Posted by:

Sophia Lee

beBee Recruiter

Description

We seek outstanding applicants for Principal Researcher positions at Microsoft Research Montreal.

Applicants must have the passion and ability to craft and pursue an independent research program to further our understanding of deep learning methods.

The Microsoft Research Montréal Lab's Machine Learning team develops state-of-the-art theoretically grounded methods to broaden the applicatibility of ML systems, with the goals of 1/ providing a deeper understanding of the core principles underlying current and future algorithms and 2/ improving real products through machine learning.

The team has three main focus areas:
Gaming and AI, building tools to improve the gaming experience. Our research covers directions like reinforcement learning, imitation learning, natural language, and compositional reasoning for out-of-distribution generalization. We bring these tools together to make artificial agents more intelligent, more teachable, more understandable, and more fun

Language for Learning and Interaction, exploring how AI agents can use language as a tool to learn from and interact with the world.

Our research directions include learning prompt-based skill repertoires, conditioning interactive agents with language and linguistic knowledge, and using grounded language models as world models.

We envision AI companions that we can teach through conversation and demonstration.

Out-of-distribution generalization and robustness, designing models that can efficiently adapt to changing environments.

This theme includes topics such as modular and reusable architectures for few-shot and zero-shot learning, off-policy and offline reinforcement learning, and the detection of spurious correlations.

We also work on learning factored, disentangled, and causal representations for images, language, reinforcement learning as well as the medical domain.

In addition to these themes, we work in close collaboration with the MSR Montréal's FATE team, addressing questions such as the proper evaluation of language models for harm assessment and the use of reinforcement learning and optimization tools for harm mitigation.

Research

Responsibilities:

Qualifications:

Required Qualifications:

Doctorate in relevant field AND 3+ years related reasearch experience OR equivalent experience

Preferred Qualifications:

A strong longterm research program in a relevant field demonstrated by publications in toptier conferences/journals.
A demonstrated ability to shape a research vision for a team or the community, provide technical leadership, and deliver on that vision.
Demonstrated ability to contribute to the success of others, e.g., though mentorship
At least 1 highimpact work (e.g., initiating a new research area, major product launch, policy change)
Demonstrated experience fostering diversity, inclusion, and belonging in a research environment
Ability to work in a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary environment, and spark research projects that span two or more of the toplevel areas listed above
Participation in the research community and leadership, such as service on conference program committees, workshop organization, teaching or tutorials, or outreach activities
Strong communication skills
Strong computing and/or experimental skills
Ability to transfer research in collaboration with product teams

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.