PhD Research Intern: NLP Researcher – MSR Africa, Nairobi at Microsoft
Qualifications
Required:
PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or related field or equivalent experience.
Enrolled in, or recently completed, doctoral studies in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field.
Knowledge of state-of-the-art and emerging Language Models, including their application in complex systems.
Familiarity with Large Language Models such as the OpenAI GPT models, Phi3.5 etc., model fine-tuning techniques (LoRa, QLoRa), and quantization, prompting techniques (Chain of Thought, ReACT etc.), and Retrieval Augment Generation
Coding and engineering skills to design and run experiments and help to drive research into product.
Preferred
Strong understanding of foundational LLM architectures and optimization techniques
Experience with multimodal models and AI agentic systems.
A passion for bridging research and real-world impact, with a desire to see innovations translated into practical solutions.
Publication record in relevant conferences, such as ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, etc.
Responsibilities
Key Responsibilities:
Participate in the African Health Stories project focused on leveraging generative AI to produce multi-modal content which is medically accurate and culturally appropriate to help patients living with Type II Diabetes make appropriate lifestyle changes.
Develop agentic solutions for producing and evaluating culturally tailored and medically accurate output.
Contribute to advancing Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi’s human-centred AI (HCAI) agenda by experimenting with new methods for scalable Human-centred evaluation of generative AI outputs.
Publish findings in top conferences or journals.
Engage in close collaboration with an interdisciplinary team comprising Researchers, Applied Scientists, Designers, and Machine Learning Engineers across various Microsoft Research teams to drive innovation and facilitate knowledge sharing.
Internship Duration: 6 Months
Locations: Nairobi, Kenya Africa
Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.
