Job Description

Research Internships at Microsoft provide a dynamic environment for research careers with a network of world-class research labs led by globally-recognized scientists and engineers. Our researchers and engineers pursue innovation in a range of scientific and technical disciplines to help solve complex challenges in diverse fields, including computing, healthcare, economics, and the environment.

The Situated Intelligence research effort aims to enable computers to reason about the physical everyday world, at human scale, and in real time, and fluidly collaborate with people in physical space. Fueled by current advances in perception, this emerging computing paradigm will generate within the next decade a new ecosystem of applications, such as systems for mixed-reality task assistance, remote collaboration, educational scenarios, mobile robots in homes or public spaces, intelligent factory floors, and many more. These systems require computational models for situated communicative processes anchored into reasoning about the physical context. Our work ranges from developing representations (for example, what are key variables for reasoning about turn-taking in a multiparty conversation?) to constructing inference models (for example, which of the surrounding objects is the target of my interlocutor’s attention?) to decision making (for example, should I take an action now?) and all the way to execution (for example, how should I render that action in the world, given the context?).

Responsibilities

Interns put inquiry and theory into practice. Alongside fellow doctoral candidates and some of the world’s best researchers, interns learn, collaborate, and network for life. Interns not only advance their own careers, but they also contribute to exciting research and development strides. During the 12-week internship, students are paired with mentors and expected to collaborate with other interns and researchers, present findings, and contribute to the vibrant life of the community. Research internships are available in all areas of research, and are offered year-round, though they typically begin in the summer.

For this internship (summer 2023), our group is seeking a PhD student with a similar passion for research on multimodal, situated interaction topics, and with a particular interest in mixed reality scenarios. Intern responsibilities will include (1) helping to develop and refine novel mixed-reality interactive systems with Platform for Situated Intelligence, (2) collecting, analyzing, and building models from multimodal data generated by existing systems, and (3) implementing and testing new techniques for computationally modeling social processes like turn-taking, engagement, attention, F-formations, etc.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

In addition to the qualifications below, you’ll need to submit a minimum of two reference letters for this position. After you submit your application, a request for letters may be sent to your list of references on your behalf. Note that reference letters cannot be requested until after you have submitted your application, and furthermore, that they might not be automatically requested for all candidates. You may wish to alert your letter writers in advance, so they will be ready to submit your letter.

• Must be currently enrolled in a PhD program in Computer Science or a related STEM field.
• Must have at least two years of PhD experience, including peer-reviewed publications, researching a topic closely related to the above description, such as AI systems for mixed reality, human-robot interaction, embodied conversational agents, multimodal interaction, etc.
• Must have at least one year of experience applying multimodal machine learning in a real interactive system.
• Must have at least two years of experience designing, conducting, and analyzing controlled experiments with human subjects.
• Must have at least two years of experience programming multimodal systems that interact with real users, e.g., robots or virtual agents, particularly by integrating multiple machine-learned components such as computer vision, speech recognition, dialogue handling, natural language generation, etc.
  

Interns are expected to be physically located in their manager’s Microsoft worksite location for the duration of their internship.

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated ability to develop original research agendas.
• Must be able to collaborate effectively with other researchers and product development teams.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, cross-group, and cross-culture collaboration.
• Ability to think unconventionally to derive creative and innovative solutions.
• Any demonstrated experience in conducting research outside of a controlled lab environment, e.g., field research, ethnography, in-the-wild studies, etc.
• Ability to think unconventionally to derive creative and innovative solutions.
  

The base pay range for this internship is USD $5,090 - $10,120 per month. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $6,690 - $11,030 per month.

Benefits/perks listed here may vary depending on the nature of employment with Microsoft and the country work location. U.S.-based interns have access to medical and vision insurance, paid sick time (accrued at 3.34 hours per pay period worked), paid federal holidays, and software discounts. Puget Sound-based interns gain access to a bus pass and a fitness club membership.

Our Commitment to Pay Equity

We are committed to the principle of pay equity – paying employees equitably for substantially similar work. To learn more about pay equity and our other commitments to increase representation and strengthen our culture of inclusion, check out our annual Diversity & Inclusion Report.

( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/annual-report )

Understanding Roles at Microsoft

The top of this page displays the role for which the base pay ranges apply – Applied Sciences IC2.

The way we define roles includes two things: discipline (the type of work) and career stage (scope and complexity). The career stage has two parts – the first identifies whether the role is a manager (M), an individual contributor (IC), an admin-technician-retail (ATR) job, or an intern. The second part identifies the relative seniority of the role – a higher number (or later letter alphabetically in the case of ATR) indicates greater scope and complexity.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.