COMPANY DESCRIPTION

Singapore Management University is a place where high-level professionalism blends together with a healthy informality. The family-like atmosphere among the SMU community fosters a culture where employees work, plan, organise and play together - building a strong collegiality and morale within the university.

Our commitment to attract and retain talent is ongoing. We offer attractive benefits and welfare, competitive compensation packages, and generous professional development opportunities - all to meet the work-life needs of our staff. No wonder, then, that SMU continues to be given numerous awards and recognition for its human resource excellence.

RESPONSIBILITIES

This position is for School of Computing and Information Systems (SCIS).
Extend and maintain the lab's VR testbed (Unity front-end, Python back-end) integrating live speech recognition, eye tracking, hand tracking, and a scene-graph representation of the task environment.
Implement an incremental multimodal reference resolver that fuses speech, gaze, and gesture into a continuously-updated belief distribution over candidate interpretations, meeting real-time latency requirements (less than 200ms end to end).
Design and implement a library of in-situ visual overlays that render the agent's belief in VR, and integrate them with the communication policy developed by the Co-PI's team.
Design, pilot, and run controlled lab user studies (between- and within-subjects, N≈24-48), including experiment scripting, instrumentation and logging of behavioural measures, participant recruitment and scheduling, and IRB documentation.
Analyse quantitative (ANOVA, trust-calibration and error measures) and qualitative (interview, think-aloud) study data, and co-author submissions to CHI, UIST, DIS, CSCW, or HRI.
Collect, annotate, and release an expanded public corpus of natural deictic instructions, including running elicitation sessions and maintaining the annotation scheme and documentation.
Other duties as assigned.

QUALIFICATIONS

Minimum Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Systems or closely related disciplines from a reputable institution of higher learning with particular focus on Human-Robot Interaction.
Minimum 1 year of relevant research experience in Human-Robot Interaction as a graduate student, research assistant or research engineer.
Proficiency in programming software/languages such as C# and Python, and the Unity environment is required.
Hands-on experience developing for VR head-mounted displays (e.g., Meta Quest, OpenXR), including eye- and hand-tracking input.
Experience integrating real-time multimodal input pipelines (speech recognition, gaze, gesture) and/or LLM/VLM APIs into interactive systems.
Proven track record and professional experience in interface prototyping, user experimental design.
Demonstrated experience and know-how on academic research, literature survey, and academic manuscript preparation.
Technical skills in designing robotic interaction techniques, driving robotic simulation studies, or robotic prototypes with novel interaction techniques for human-robot interaction.
Technical skills with respect to user research design, and statistical analysis, and qualitative data analysis.
Ability to break down complex problems and design effective solutions.
Innovating new approaches and thinking outside the box.
Applicants with research publications in the HCI or HRI area will be advantageous.
Ability to work cooperatively as part of a small, agile academic research team is essential.
Self-motivated individual who can work independently and collaboratively with team members.

OTHER INFORMATION

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Please note that your application will be sent to and reviewed by the direct employer - Singapore Management University

Research Engineer , SCIS