Research Fellow - Protecting Ordinary People from Deepfakes

The Project is funded by the UKRI ESRC as part of Dr Nightingale’s Future Leaders Fellowship for which we are hiring a research team to work on mapping and mitigating the threats to ordinary people from deepfake technology. As part of this team, we are seeking a Research Fellow to lead the development of a forensically assured verification system to detect non-consensual intimate imagery. You will be responsible for the development and day-to-day management of the system which will be built using face recognition technology. As such, you will be expected to have excellent software engineering/computational skills as well as competence in handling sensitive and confidential data. Within the project, you will be expected to work closely with the Principal Investigator and other team members to integrate experimental findings and theory to develop new tools and techniques, and/or to evolve the development of the system. We will also engage in codesign with project partners, including the police, the public, and charities to ensure that the system is useful, usable, trusted, and sustainable.

We are looking for someone with experience in software/machine learning engineering, automated data collection (crawling, scraping, parsing), and data management. Working closely with the Principal Investigator, you will lead and mentor the research team on a day-to-day basis to ensure delivery of the Project objectives and research priorities across a large collaborative project. You will engage with external project partners and stakeholders (including the media and general public), lead Project dissemination events, and represent the Project at conferences.

The Psychology Department is a busy teaching and research active Department. It is home to a friendly group of around 40 Academic staff, with teams of Research and Professional Services and Technical staff. The Department supports a large cohort of Undergraduate, Masters and Postgraduate research students; and a wide range of research projects including several cross-institution grants. 

Further information is available at: www.psych.lancs.ac.uk and the benefits of working at Lancaster University, including support for relocation from overseas: Jobs - Lancaster University

Please upload a cover letter with your application.

This is a full-time post, and we expect an April start date.

This role is indefinite, subject to funding, which is currently available until November 2028.

Informal enquiries are welcome and should be addressed to Dr. Sophie Nightingale, Senior Lecturer, s.nightingale1@lancaster.ac.uk.

Please note: unless specified otherwise in the advert, all advertised roles are UK based.

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