Joining the lab

📢 We are hiring! Multiple postdoctoral positions in fundamental AI research at the University of Edinburgh, as part of the new SOFAIR Lab (Science of Fundamental AI Research), a UKRI/EPSRC-funded national lab building the next generation of open-source AI.

You will work with Frank Keller, Mirella Lapata, Amos Storkey, and me on topics including:

• Novel model architectures
• New learning objectives and training paradigms
• Open-source multimodal foundation models
• Reasoning, uncertainty awareness, and efficiency

The roles involve close collaboration with our colleagues in Edinburgh and our SOFAIR partners at UCL, Cambridge, and Oxford. Details and applications: University of Edinburgh vacancy page.

I am looking for motivated PhD students with strong backgrounds in machine learning, NLP, or related areas. You can apply via the ILCC PhD programme, the CDT in Responsible NLP, or the CDT in Machine Learning Systems.

I look for strong technical skills, curiosity, and clear scientific communication. If you would like to reach out before applying, please include a brief description of your research interests and why you think we would be a good fit.

We supervise MSc theses at both Edinburgh and Amsterdam. To inquire, email me with your CV, transcripts, and grades. Recent preprints from work led by MSc students:

• Knowledge Offloading: Decomposing LLMs into Sparse Backbones and Memory Modules
• Shared Doubt: Zero-shot Cross-Lingual Confidence Estimation for Language Models

The lab often hosts visiting PhD students and postdocs at Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a vibrant environment with a strong NLP and ML community, and visits tend to be very productive. We ask that visitors' research interests are primarily aligned with the lab's work, and that they arrange their own funding before reaching out.