| (1) Job Details
Job title: Research Associate
School: School of Informatics
Line manager: Principal Investigator for the research programme
(2) Job Purpose
The Research Associate will take a significant role in shaping and disseminating the high-level architecture that provides the necessary framework. The work will adopt agile methods of co-design and co-production to deliver a research environment that enables extreme scale computation, extreme scale data handling and rapid development of complex scientific workflows. These will build on existing powerful systems and have three key properties:
- Convenient composition of mixtures of abstract and specific heterogeneous workflow fragments;
- Fluent management of experimental development and selective incorporation of its results into production; and
- Integrated tools that enable domain experts to directly manage their large and complex data-powered and computationally intensive campaigns.
(3) Representative Work Activities
In general, to support the Principal Investigator of a specific project in achieving the goals of that project, under his/her direction.
• Undertaking a specific role in the research project under supervision
• Taking responsibility for some elements of the planned research
• Planning and carrying out a work programme appropriate to the research activity
• Developing own research portfolio in related areas
• Contributing to the writing of research grants
• Contributing to dissemination and publication of personal and/or research teams findings as appropriate.
• Contribute to learning and teaching through activities such as project supervision, tutoring and marking (limited to no more than 5% on an annualised basis).
(4) Planning and organising
The post holder will have to agree a general plan of research with the Principal Investigator and progress will be monitored at pre-scheduled meetings.
(5) Problem Solving
The problems to be faced are purely scientific and the post holder will supply the detailed expertise for delivering a solution. They will be expected to achieve this under instruction by and with advice from the Principal Investigator and other academic and senior research staff.
(6) Decision making
The post holder will determine the specific techniques and approaches to be used in the course of the research, in agreement with the principal investigator.
(7) Key contacts/relationships
The postholder will principally interact with the Principal Investigator and other project staff and students. More generally, the postholder will discuss the work, and other questions of scientific interest, with other members of the School. The postholder will be expected to represent the University externally, by presenting their work at specialist meeting or workshops in the relevant research area. They may also be required to provide advice and support to relevant students.
(8) Knowledge, skills and experience
Essential
• First degree and PhD in computing science (or equivalent).
• Practical skills in developing system prototypes.
• Reasoning skills addressing scale and complexity.
• Good communication skills for:
- Collaboration across organisational, national and discipline boundaries
- For technical specification and reporting; and
- For reporting research.
Desirable
• Experience of large scale systems.
• Experience of working across discipline boundaries on applications. |
