About the job

The Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi team is looking for two Machine Learning Research interns to join our team for 6 months.

Responsibilities

• The interns will join a project which aims to adapt and finetune Small Language Models (SLMs) for region specific languages in the agriculture domain in Kenya and India for multilingual and multimodal tasks. Research includes benchmarking SLM performance, creating algorithms to improve performance, building and training Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text to Speech (TTS) models for local languages.
• The internship will involve active collaborations with Researchers, applied Scientists, Designers and ML engineers in various Microsoft Research teams.
• This is an exceptional opportunity to drive ambitious machine learning research while collaborating with domain experts to push the state of the art in efficient AI, with the potential for enormous real-world impact.
• We welcome applicants with either Machine Learning, NLP or equivalent background.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing or recently completed a PhD in Machine Learning, NLP, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Experience with deep learning and natural language processing.
• Strong theoretical and practical knowledge of machine learning algorithms, with a preferred focus on NLP.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, TensorFlow, and/or PyTorch.
• Clear understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs) & related AI technologies
• Passion for staying up to date with the latest advancements in AI & ML.
• Excellent problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills within a multidisciplinary team.
• Passionate about building the next generation of Equitable AI technology for Africa and the world.

Preferred Qualifications

• Publication record in relevant conferences, such as ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, etc.