Postdoctoral Research Associate / Research Software Engineer for the British Election StudyUniversity

About the role

The Department of Informatics at King’s College London is seeking to appoint a Postdoctoral Researcher to lead the development and maintenance of the British Election Study’s public facing AI Interface (BES-AII).

The researcher will be responsible for upgrading the BES’s data infrastructure, including harmonising data across survey waves, and will collaborate with other members of the BES team (largely political scientists) to develop a knowledge base (ontology) for the BES, which will support the mapping of related BES survey questions, political concepts, and third-party political data.

Building on the BES data infrastructure and knowledge base, the researcher will lead the development of the BES-AII where users can interact with and export BES data using natural language queries. The system will initially build on an existing data retrieval architecture using Retrieval Augmented Generation and will then move towards using more advanced tools which combine large language models and knowledge bases (e.g., LLM-Wiki -  https://llm-wiki.net/). We also expect that the researcher will play a small role in supporting the collection and analysis of donated social media data from BES survey respondents, if required.

Throughout the project, the researcher will contribute to outreach activities, will support extensive (AI) safety testing, and will contribute to ensuring that the BES maintains its duty to remain politically impartial.

The role is primarily focused on research software development, but we anticipate additional opportunities for the researcher to contribute to computational social science and AI safety research using BES data.

The researcher will be based in the Department of Informatics and will report to Dr Max Falkenberg (primary supervisor), and Professor Rosie Campbell (second supervisor; political science lead for the BES at KCL).

This is a part-time post (15 hours per week; 40% FTE), and you will be offered a fixed term contract for 36 months from your start date. There is a possibility, subject to approvals, that the post can be extended to 50% FTE.

Research staff at King’s are entitled to at least 10 days per year (pro-rata) for professional development. This entitlement, from the  Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers, applies to Postdocs, Research Assistants, Research and Teaching Technicians, Teaching Fellows and AEP equivalent up to and including grade 7. Visit the  Centre for Research Staff Development for more information.

£50,766 pro-rata, including London Weighting Allowance