Principal Research Scientist – Multimodal (Cairo, Egypt)

Cairo, Egypt ·  Full Time ·  Manager/Supervisor

About Affectiva

Affectiva is a Boston, MA, MIT Media Lab spin-off and the leading provider of Human Perception AI with software that analyzes facial and vocal expressions to identify complex human emotional and cognitive states. Our vision is that technology needs to be able to sense, adapt, and respond to people’s non-verbal signals, mental states, emotions and reactions, just the way humans do. We are humanizing technology!

Our patented AI software uses machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and speech science. Affectiva has built the world’s largest emotion data repository with over 8.5M faces analyzed in 87 countries. Affectiva is used by one fourth of the Fortune Global 500 companies for advertising testing and is now working with leading automotive OEMs and Tier 1s on next generation driver-state monitoring and in-cabin mood sensing.

As you can imagine, such an ambitious vision takes a great team with a strong desire to explore and innovate. We are growing our team to improve and expand our core technologies and help solve many unique and interesting problems focused around sensing, understanding and adapting to human states. And, in building new products that never existed before, we are disrupting billion dollar industries such as advertising and automotive.

Position

This position, based in Cairo, Egypt, is on the Science team, the team tasked with creating and refining Affectiva’s technology. We are a group of individuals with backgrounds in machine learning, computer vision, and affective computing.

We’re looking for researchers to extend our emotion sensing technology beyond the face and to analyze the human voice. Our goal is to build out our technology to perform emotion sensing unimodally from speech, as well as multi-modally from speech and facial expressions when both channels are present.

The areas of the research this employee will be expected to focus on includes multi-modal emotion sensing from speech and face and semi-supervised and unsupervised techniques for automatic audio visual data collection and annotation. The employee will work collaboratively with other members of the multimodal team to innovate and develop these exciting areas of research.

Ideal candidates will be people who will contribute ideas and want to help shape the future of this space and can execute ideas effectively and efficiently. This position will report to the Director of AI Research.

Responsibilities:

• Explore feature-level fusion methodologies and implement a subset of the viable feature-level fusion classification approaches for emotional state estimation from audio-visual data
• Develop data annotation experiments related to
  • Bootstrapping labels from video to audio channel and vise verse.
  • Autonomous learning paired with collaborative learning based approaches
• Explore other weakly supervised or unsupervised approaches
• Design, implement, and evaluate crowd-sourcing tasks for collecting datasets of affective interactions
• Evaluate technical feasibility of research experiments and clearly communicate your implementations, experiments, and conclusions
• Work with engineers and labelers to design scalable annotation tools.
• Patent and publish findings in speech, machine learning, and affective computing

Qualifications:

• Graduate degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or Mathematics with specialization in speech processing or machine learning
• At least 3 years of experience using deep learning techniques (CNN, RNN, LSTM) on speech processing tasks (e.g., speech recognition, classification, diarization, etc.)
• Experience working with deep learning frameworks (e.g. TensorFlow, Theano, Caffe) including implementing custom layers
• Passionate about innovation and pushing state of the art research
• Strong publication record in journals/proceedings such as ICASSP, NIPS, PAMI, InterSpeech
• Familiar with programming languages such as C/C++, Python.
• Experience providing technical leadership to project teams
• Good presentation and communication skills

Additional Information and Company Benefits:

• Full Time Position located in 5th settlement – New Cairo – Egypt
• Competitive Benefits Package including
• Social Insurance
• Casual Startup office culture, collaborative office space
• Flexible work schedule
• Complimentary snacks and drinks, and lunch provided once a week

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Please click here to apply.