Postdoctoral Researcher – AI for Sustainability

Join a team that is dedicated to applying science to some of today's most complex challenges, whether it’s discovering a new way for doctors to help patients, teaming with environmentalists to clean up our waterways or enabling retailers to personalise customer service.

The work location for this role is the IBM Hursley Lab near Winchester or the Daresbury Lab near Warrington. IBM has a hybrid work model with 3 days onsite expected.

Your role and responsibilities:

• We seek applications from innovative researchers with machine learning and artificial intelligence expertise to join our Climate and Sustainability and our Sustainable Materials team. You will tackle challenges at the forefront of AI, advancing generative and multi-modal model AI for high-impact materials discovery, geospatial and climate-related applications.
• As a Member Of Our IBM Research Team, You Will Explore Novel Research Opportunities By Addressing Problems At The Forefront Of AI. Potential Research Topics Include, But Are Not Limited To:

• Developing advanced AI architectures and algorithms to train, fine-tune, and apply generative models for multi-modal tasks, directly influencing high-impact industry sectors.
• Enhancing foundation models to solve real sustainability challenges, including specialised foundation models for domain applications as well as enhancing capabilities of general language models.
• Design and test single- or multi-agent AI systems using cutting-edge benchmarks or develop solutions tailored to business-critical use cases.

Required education:

• Doctorate Degree

Required technical and professional expertise:

• Doctorate Degree in Computer Science (especially in Artificial Intelligence focusing on computer vision, LLMs, NLP, data generation), Physics, Mathematics, or a closely related field.
• Demonstrated experience in benchmarking foundational models for real-world applications.
• Experience in machine learning and developing AI models in frameworks such as Pytorch, TensorFlow, FSDP, Ray, and so forth.
• Expertise in one or more AI areas, including transfer learning, model distillation, surrogate models, and reinforcement learning.
• Research experience in designing and developing domain-specific and/or generalisable models.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience:

• Strong research skills in large AI models for materials, geospatial and climate applications.
• Demonstrated experience in developing, training, and testing generative models, such as LLMs or multi-modal foundation models.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate research through publications or presentations in top-tier conferences such as NeurIPs, ICLR, AAAI, AGU, IGARSS.

About Business Unit:

IBM Research is the organic growth engine of IBM and an innovation engine for our customers and partners. As part of this mission, IBM Research anticipates and examines 'What's Next in Computing' to ultimately create and integrate the technologies the world relies upon to solve big challenges and unlock new opportunities.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM:

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that dedication to our clients' success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.