Interested applicants are invited to apply directly at the NUS Career Portal

Your application will be processed only if you apply via NUS Career Portal

We regret that only shortlisted candidates will be notified.

Introduction

Are you curious about how technology shapes the way we understand the news? Join us at CTIC as a Research Assistant, where you'll be part of an exciting and supportive team working at the intersection of computer science and communication.

The National University of Singapore Centre for Trusted Internet and Community (CTIC) is dedicated to the inter-disciplinary study of the Internet and its implications on the society of the future. The first-of-its-kind centre will integrate social and behavioural science research, digital technologies, data-driven approaches, and policy studies to holistically examine the Internet and its societal impact including topics such as the future of privacy, freedom of expression, misinformation and disinformation, as well as maintaining social security and stability.

This is an exciting opportunity to join us as a Research Assistant in Computational Social Science under a new programme titled "Digital Information Resilience: Restoring Trust and Nudging Behaviours in Digitalisation".

Job Description

As a Research Assistant (RA) in Computational Social Science with CTIC, you will work closely with the Dr. Kokil Jaidka on a research problem related to the psychological antecedents of trust and belief among social media users.

We are hiring for an RA with a computer science or related background, who will be tasked to focus on natural language processing and generation (NLProc, Large Language Models or LLMs, Computational Linguistics).

Job Responsibilities:

Research & Experiments
• Dive into relevant research by conducting literature reviews
• Help design and run experiments focused on understanding news quality and related phenomena
• Work with data and language models - training, fine-tuning, and analysis

Project & Team Support
• Help coordinate annotator hiring and other project logistics
• Contribute to maintaining and documenting codebases and tools developed during research

Communication & Writing
• Write accessible pieces for university blogs and mainstream media
• Share your knowledge through tutorials or presentations
• Play an active role in developing 2-4 academic papers a year, either as lead or co-author

You'll typically be involved in 2-3 projects at a time. Each project moves through five main stages:
• Literature review and planning
• Building and testing early models
• Data collection and pre-processing
• Analysis and drawing insights
• Writing and sharing findings

Requirements

• A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field
• Previous research experience with language models (LLMs or VLMs), ideally with first-author publications or preprints
• Strong skills in Python, especially for working with LLMs
• Clear and effective communication-both written and spoken
• Bonus points for experience with Hadoop, Node.js, or React, but not required
• Good time management and the ability to work across multiple projects

We value a respectful, inclusive, and balanced work environment. Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted