Research Engineer (1-year contract or till 14 Jan 2028), SCIS

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.