Open Position: Research Programmer and Project Manager

MIT House_n Research Group

Job Description:

This is a new position. Seeking a Research Programmer to join a multi-disciplinary research group that develops and evaluates novel home and mobile computing technologies for measuring behavior and helping people stay healthy as they age. This position is funded by a new three-year NSF grant to develop a shared research community resource consisting of a portable home multi-modal sensing system and datasets collected from people living in their own homes using the system. The successful applicant will work on research, programming, and project management and contribute to all aspects of a research project to instrument homes with sensors and collect data about everyday activities to be used by researchers around the world. A summary of the project can be found here: http://www.mit.edu/~intille/AbstractNSF.html.

Responsibilities will include (1) participating on a team developing a portable in-home sensor kit that can gather data about behavior and activity patterns for research purposes, using sensors developed at MIT and elsewhere, (2) writing web-based software to collect and summarize data gathered from the kit, (3) recruiting participants to live with the technology for several months at a time, (4) coordinating deployment of the technology and data gathering throughout multi-month studies, (5) developing software to simplify storage, backup, and searching of the data, in C# and/or Java, (6) overseeing undergraduate students who will annotate collected data, (7) conducting and summarizing pre and post-study interviews with participants, (8) developing software to allow distributed web-based annotation of data sets consisting of terabytes of audio and image data, and (9) providing documentation to the research community to simplify use of the data sets, software, and annotation system. The successful applicant will have the opportunity to pursue independent research that uses the home sensor system and behavior data sets.

The appointment will be renewable for up to 3 years contingent upon funding and performance.

For additional information, read the project abstract.

Qualifications:

Bachelors or advanced degree in computer science or related field, expert competency in Java and/or C#, and experience developing web-based client/server applications. Candidate should possess excellent written and verbal communication skills and the ability to interact with study participants. Desirable: publication record, experience working with research participants in studies with human subjects, experience working in health technology, audio or visual processing, and/or pattern recognition, and experience with mobile phone programming, sensors, and wireless devices.  

To Apply:

Please forward a cover letter, a CV (including contact information for three references), and, if available, up to two recent publications if available to Dr. Stephen Intille via email (Intille@mit.edu).  Applications will be reviewed as received, with negotiable start date (ideally spring 2008). For more details on the project or position, contact Dr. Intille via email or at 617-452-2346.