Scientist (Embodied AI) (Social Cognitive Computing Department), IHPC

The Cognitive and Human-like AI group at the Institute of High Performance Computing, A.STAR, Singapore invites applications with passion to conduct R&D in Embodied Artificial Intelligence (EAI) to endow robots with human-like intelligence to work collaboratively with humans on real-world tasks. The goal is for robots to become peer-like co-workers capable of understanding, adapting, and sharing responsibilities with humans, while embedding safety, commonsense reasoning, and continual learning for reliable deployment within complex human environments.

You will be part of our team developing collaborative intelligence for robots for application in the domain of manufacturing, trade and connectivity.

The successful candidate will be involved in some or all of the following tasks:

• Research in human-robot interaction involving multimodal perception, human and situation understanding, world representation, decision making, learning and behaviour.
• Design EAI algorithms such as for human-centric spatial awareness and intent prediction to ensure safe, fluid, and proactive collaboration between humans and robots in shared workspaces.
• Development, experimentation, testing and system integration of human-robot interaction modules for various real world robotics applications.
• Actively collaborate with other researchers in R&D activities including scientific writing, algorithm development, testing and deployment of the intelligence systems.

Job Requirements:

• PhD in Robotics or a field of study related to EAI (e.g. Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Cognitive Science, Cognitive Architectures, Robotic Foundation Models, etc.)
• Good programming skills in python and/or C++ is essential.
• Experience with ROS, Linux and/or other robotic middleware system is an advantage.
• Experience in dataset curation and fine-tuning Vision-Language-Action (VLA) or Vision-Language Models (VLM) for robotics is an advantage.
• Past work in the following areas is an advantage: 3D vision and spatial reasoning human-robot interaction situation representation of human-agent shared tasks/spaces representation, modelling and reasoning of human actions/behaviours.
• Good communication skill, a team player and resourceful.