The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is one of the nation’s largest, most successful university-affiliated computer research institutes. ISI’s VISTA center (https://www.isi.edu/centers/vista/overview) performs research in natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, biometrics, optical character recognition (OCR), and speech and text analytics. Much of our software is open-source and we publish in top conferences.
Some of our current and upcoming projects include:
- Creation of a new Python open source information extraction toolkit to enable reasoning and experimentation using diverse document interpretations
- Detecting and counteracting social engineering attacks
- Construction of knowledge bases from text, images, audio, and video which can represent multiple hypotheses about the state of the world
- Automatic extraction of events, entities, and causal and temporal relations between them (who did what to whom, when, and why?) from text
- Improving cross-language information retrieval (searching for English concepts in foreign-language documents) for text in low-resource languages (e.g. Swahili, Tagalog)
- Automatic generation of fictional stories
As a part of our team, you’d help execute these and other research projects. Key requirements are the ability to learn new technologies rapidly and to communicate technical ideas clearly.
Open positions:
- For junior software engineers/new graduates with a background or interest in NLP: https://usccareers.usc.edu/job/waltham/research-programmer-i... (Waltham, MA)
- For early-career software engineers with a background or interest in NLP: https://usccareers.usc.edu/job/waltham/research-programmer-i... (Waltham, MA)
- For experienced generalist software engineers, no NLP background required: https://usccareers.usc.edu/job/waltham/research-programmer-i... (Waltham, MA; Marina del Rey, CA; or remote within US)