Assistant Research Scientist (PREP0004124) Full-time

Assistant Research Scientist

This position is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Professional Research Experience Program (PREP). NIST recognizes that its research staff may wish to collaborate with researchers at academic institutions on specific projects of mutual interest and thus requires that such institutions must be the recipient of a PREP award. The PREP program requires staff from a wide range of backgrounds to work on scientific research in many areas. Employees in this position will perform technical work that underpins the scientific research of the collaboration.

Research Title: UAS Research Software Engineer

The work will entail:

• Conduct a literature review and document criteria for drone communications simulator solutions and the datasets that are used to train and test them.
• Prepare industry landscape identifying long-range communications, mesh networking, and best practices on developing methodologies of communications technologies.
• Develop a software program for a new drone communications simulator platform or to retrofit an existing platform, integrating radio hardware communications components.
• Develop open-source code and processes.
• Create and collect measurement data for the drone simulator.
• Document the dataset curation process for public use and determine the target public safety datasets and dataset enhancement options.
• Participate in public safety working groups and stakeholder testing to compare simulations with live UAS flights and curate shared information from collaborators.
• Evaluate drone simulator use cases and what datasets could be used to train and test them, as well as identify technology challenges and gaps to address.

Qualifications

– A Master's degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related field

– Knowledge of network communications, network routing, and radio signaling

– Knowledge of robotics, UAS, or autonomous software programming (PX4, ArduPilot, AirSim, MAVLink)

– Knowledge of software engineering for virtual simulation applications

– Experience with modern AI tools and applications (AWS, GCP, Azure, MLFlow, SQL, BigQuery, Snowflake)

– Experience with development and manipulation of software code, such as Python, C, C++, Qt, JavaScript

– Knowledge of data structures, formats, and software coding curation processes

– Experience with developing open-source code, identifying use cases, and evaluating dataset quality and representativeness

– Knowledge of mathematical probability and statistics, and optimization methods

– Knowledge of machine learning, including supervised and unsupervised learning, deep learning, and model evaluation

– Knowledge of dataset biases and labeling issues

– Knowledge of translating operational needs into solvable radio signal or networking problems

– US Citizens Preferred