Research Associate – AI, Machine Learning & Robotics

About the role

The School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Nanyang Technological University seeks a Research Associate to advance efficient AI, machine learning and robotics algorithms. The focus is on computational efficiency, memory reduction and energy‑aware deployment for foundation models such as large language models, vision‑language models and vision‑language‑action models.

Key responsibilities

• Develop accelerated AI/ML and robotics algorithms that cut computation cost, memory footprint and power consumption.
• Design and optimise training and inference pipelines for foundation models across various scales and deployment settings.
• Apply and advance model‑compression techniques including quantisation, pruning, knowledge distillation and low‑rank adaptation.
• Conduct algorithm‑hardware co‑design for efficient deployment on robotic, edge and heterogeneous computing platforms.
• Create methods for low‑latency, high‑throughput AI deployment on cloud and edge devices while respecting energy constraints.
• Implement, evaluate and benchmark accelerated models using rigorous experimental protocols.
• Publish research findings in top‑tier AI, ML and robotics conferences and journals.
• Collaborate with interdisciplinary teams spanning AI, systems and robotics.
• Contribute to open‑source codebases and promote reproducible research practices.

Required profile

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence or a closely related field.
• Strong research background in AI and machine learning with a focus on efficient or accelerated models.
• Proven experience with model‑compression techniques and deployment on cloud, edge or robotic platforms.

Required skills

• Model compression (quantisation, pruning, knowledge distillation, low‑rank adaptation)
• Algorithm‑hardware co‑design
• Efficient training and inference pipeline development
• Cloud and edge deployment optimisation