Natural Language Processing Research Internship

Team Description:Kitware is a leader in creating cutting-edge algorithms and software for automated image, video, text, and multimodal analysis. Our solutions embrace artificial intelligence adding measurable value to government agencies, commercial organizations, and academic institutions worldwide. We understand the difficulties in extracting, interpreting, and utilizing information across images, video, metadata, and text, and we recognize the need for robust, affordable solutions. We seek to advance artificial intelligence, computer vision, and other related fields through research and development and through collaborative projects that build on our open source software platforms, such asVIAME, Telesculptor, and ALIGN.

About the Projects: Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision research are increasingly interrelated, with common computational approaches and the increasing availability of text + image/video benchmarks. Several current projects leverage recent advances in large language models (LLMs), with applications to diverse domains and use cases like information extraction, decision-making, reasoning, controlled scenario generation, and combatting disinformation. Related projects emphasize knowledge extraction and representation, multimodal media asset exploitation, understanding written instructions, and more.

Much of Kitware’s work involves applying state-of-the-art artificial intelligence approaches to dynamic, real-world problems. In this case, you will have the opportunity to contribute your skills to projects focused on national security, making a difference on a daily basis to protect our country. Research and Development Engineers at Kitware also enjoy benefits commonly associated with a position in academia, such as support and encouragement for the publication of novel work. There are also frequent opportunities to collaborate with world-renowned academic partners on ongoing research projects.

We partner with premier government R&D agencies such as DARPA, IARPA, AFRL, NVESD, NOAA, ONR, other branches of the US military, and multiple members of the Intelligence Community on a range of efforts including prime contracts, SBIRs, and STTRs. In addition, we provide commercial services to companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Kitware employs an open source business model to foster extended, collaborative communities, and to provide flexible, high-quality technical solutions. If you’ve used CMake, ITK, or VTK, you know our work and the impact it has on the communities we help build.

In This Position You Will:

• Be part of Kitware's overall mission of positive social impact through work in areas such as environmental monitoring, national and global security, ethical and responsible AI, open science, scientific computing, and medical computing.
• Develop robust solutions in the areas of Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models, Foundation Models, ML, and AI.
• Develop and evaluate algorithms to understand the textual content of textual and multi-modal data, and/or perform reasoning on extracted data.

Required Qualificiations:

• Ph.D. students in Computer Science or related fields.
• Experience with natural language text generation, foundation models, large language models (LLMs), using one or more of GPT, Claude, BERT, or similar.
• Publication history in NLP (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL) conferences, or other AI venues incorporating NLP (AAAI, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS).
• Candidates should include a list of publications as part of their resume/CV.
• Due to contractual restrictions, only US Citizens will be considered for this position.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with multiple large multimodal AI models, including image, text, and speech modalities.
• Past work on adapting NLP and LLMs to different domains and applications, including decision-making, reasoning, and inference.