Young Investigator, Scientific Discovery

Persons in these roles are expected to work from our offices in Seattle. 

Compensation Range: $159,650

Who You Are:

Are you passionate about AI, and its potential to help in the scientific process? We are looking for talented researchers interested in applying their skills towards the next generation of intelligent systems, and pursuing our mission of AI for the common good.

Our team is currently working on exciting, collaborative new projects in the area of intelligent agents and scientific discovery, including: data-driven discovery, AI research assistants for scientists, end-to-end discovery, agents that can continually learn over time, and methods for training agentic models. We are looking for ambitious, motivated researchers, ready to take on a complex challenge with huge potential impact for the future of AI, in particular with skills and interest in the following areas:

• Agentic planning, reasoning, and learning
• Automated and AI-assisted scientific discovery
• Data-driven discovery
• Intelligent agents
• Learning, representation, and reasoning
• Model tuning and specialization

The Young Investigator position:

• Duration: 1-3 years
• Start date: Flexible
• Candidates: Are within one year of completing their PhD, or already have a PhD
• The Allen AI Young Investigator is a postdoctoral program offering unique benefits. The program will enable you to balance working collaboratively on an Ai2 project while pursuing an independent research agenda.

Who We Are: 

The Aristo team at Ai2 has pioneered research in machine reasoning, learning, and explanation for many years, including creating the first system to pass standardized science tests (8th Grade) back in 2019. Since then, we have leveraged language models to create advances in multihop reasoning, explanation,intelligent agents,  and learning. Our most recent work is in the area of assisted and automated scientific discovery, an ambitious and exciting  integration of all these technologies. See our publications for examples of our work. 

Your Next Challenge:

At Ai2, you will be working with world-class AI researchers and talented software engineers. We perform team-based, ambitious research, with a mandate to strive for big breakthroughs, not just incremental progress, in an exciting and interactive workplace. 

What You’ll Need:

• You are an energetic, inspired individual with a passion for AI.
• Are within one year of completing their PhD, or already have a PhD, with research experience in Computer Science or related field.
• You have a strong publication record in AI-related areas, in particular in the areas of interest listed above.  Example venues include ACL, ICLR, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, and NAACL.  Contributions to research communities (e.g. workshop organization, tutorials) are a plus.
• You have strong software engineering skills.
• The Allen AI Young Investigator is a postdoctoral program offering unique benefits. The program will enable you to balance working collaboratively on an Ai2 project while pursuing an independent research agenda.

Physical Demands and Work Environment:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by a team member to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the functions.

• Must be able to remain in a stationary position for long periods of time. 
• The ability to communicate information and ideas so others will understand. Must be able to exchange accurate information in these situations. 
• The ability to observe details at close range.
• Can work under deadlines.

A Little More About Ai2:

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a non-profit research institute in Seattle founded by Paul Allen. The core mission of Ai2 is to contribute to humanity through high-impact research in artificial intelligence. 

In addition to Ai2’s core mission, we also aim to contribute to humanity through our treatment of each member of the Ai2 Team. Some highlights are:

• We are a learning organization – because everything Ai2 does is ground-breaking, we are learning every day. Similarly, through weekly Ai2 Academy lectures, a wide variety of world-class AI experts as guest speakers, and our commitment to your personal on-going education, Ai2 is a place where you will have opportunities to continue learning alongside your coworkers. 
• We