This page describes open positions. Description on the NII internship program is at the bottom of this page.

Open Positions

Overview

Our research group welcomes researchers, programmers, and students interested in the following positions.

• Researchers: postdoc researchers and researchers entitled as project assitant/associate professors
• Research engineers (scientific programmers)
• PhD students
• Intern graduate students

Work Topics

We have been running two large projects. Both projects focus on dependability of emerging smart systems, especially, autonomous driving systems, with different focuses.

• ERATO-MMSD Project (2016-2022.03, possibly plus some extended period, focus on complexity of cyber-physical systems)
• MIRAI-eAI Project (2021-2025.03, focus on dependability with deep learning components)

For these projects, experts on the following and relevant topics are highly welcome.

• Search-based software engineering, especially, search-based testing (application of metaheuristic optimization for analysis, testing and debugging)
• Safety engineering and reliability engineering
• Verification and validation techniques including testing, formal methods, fault localization, automated repair
• Techniques for safety, explainability, trustworthiness of machine learning models, especially, deep neural networks

Application procedure

Applications should be sent to f-ishikawa < a > nii.ac.jp with the subject “TrarSE Group Application.” Please include the following information.

• Intended job name (researcher, research engineer, phd student, intern student)
• Your brief CV
• Short description of research interests (can be very informal and short)
• The list of papers (a dblp or Google scholar link will do, for example)
• A couple of representative papers (in pdf)
• The contact of two references (Preferably)

You do not need to clarify or specify which project you belong to.

We will contact you for further material, provided that we find sufficient relevance in your application.

More detail

There is a dedicated page for open positions in ERATO-MMSD Project and many points other than the research theme are common in MIRAI-eAI Project.

Notable points are:

• You don't need to speak the Japanese language for the work. Most of our project members are non-Japanese natives.
• For job positions (researchers and reserach engineers), contracts are updated each fiscal year. The annual gross salary is based on your qualifications it starts at approximately JPY 4,250,000. Please send inquiry for more detailed information.

For further information and the latest status of open positions, please inquire by email (f-ishikawa < a > nii.ac.jp)

NII Internship

This is a scheme by NII only for its partner universities. The detailed information of the call for intern students can be found on the NII web site and in the partner universities.

The current call includes the following topics in our group:

Risk-Aware Debugging Techniques for Deep Neural Networks

Investigates how to test and debug deep neural networks by adapting software engineering techniques such as search-based testing, fault localization, and automated repair, especially in the context of safety/risk for automated driving systems

Smart Testing and Debugging for Cyber-Physical and Intelligent Systems

Investigates how to test and debug complex, fuzzy, and uncertain cyber-physical systems and AI systems

This call is part of an internship program by NII (National Institute of Informatics, Japan). Calls are basically made twice a year by NII. First please check the general information by NII

Intern students are expected to learn further knowledge and skills through collaborative activities for promoting our research activities and/or exploring further research topic. Depending on the status of the intern students (e.g., already have active master/phd topics or not), actual work in the internship can be determined flexibly through discussion. The outputs are typically joint papers and/or implemented software, but depend on the topic and the duration of the internship.

Specifically, the following two directions exist to determine the work at the internship.

• Option 1: Investigating Your Own Research with Different People and Environment
  Intern students may bring their own studies to exchange knowledge and ideas of each other to explore further research directions (often in the case of PhD students).
• Option 2: Joining Our Project
  Intern students may choose tasks in existing activities, typically software development tasks (often in the case of master students). We have a variety of tasks, from mathematical and theoretical methods to middleware and GUI tools. It can be a development-oriented project (focusing more on completeness and usability) or a research-oriented project (focusing also on essential novelty and scientific reliability).

You can check research introduction and record including the publications. However, the information is often not the latest and it should be much easier to just ask me and discuss together, clarifying your interest and expertise.

In addition to interactions with the supervisor himself, intern students will join various activities in related research groups. We have intensitve project-level activities with researchers/practitioners in our projects including ERATO-MMSD Project and MIRAI-eAI Project.