Data/AI research engineer

Level of qualifications required: PhD or equivalent

Fonction: Temporary scientific engineer

About the research centre or Inria department

The Inria Saclay-Île-de-France Research Centre was established in 2008. It has developed as part of the Saclay site in partnership with Paris-Saclay University and with the Institut Polytechnique de Paris .

The centre has 40 project teams , 27 of which operate jointly with Paris-Saclay University and the Institut Polytechnique de Paris; Its activities occupy over 600 people, scientists and research and innovation support staff, including 44 different nationalities.

Context

Interactions and communication within society increasingly take place online, through online media (that may also reflect content published in print, on the radio, or on TV), and on social networks. Online communication raises risks of manipulation, misinformation, or harms, with large audience being reachable at a relatively low cost. The recent availability of Generative AI tools drives up the volume of potentially false information. Further, the nature of misinformation is that false claims often resurface after some time gaps. Consequently, the fact‑checking agencies complain about wasting a lot of effort in re‑reviewing such claims.

Assignment

Proposed work: The research community has formalized the above problem as: retrieving relevant fact checks given an input claim. The key challenge is identifying a resurfaced claim as it is often formulated differently than the one already checked; novel formulations may use paraphrasing, introduce sarcasm, eliminate or replace context, and so on.

Our goal is to design and develop a complete approach for streaming content analysis, which, on one hand, given an input claim, identifies past fact‑checks (FCs, in short), and on the other hand, tracks the evolution and origin of claims, across media content of many forms (social media messages, short like tweets or longer such as Facebook posts, blogs, news‑propagating websites, etc.). While we will rely as necessary on existing English benchmarks, our focus will be primarily on French, for which we plan to build and share corpora and models. This work is part of our participation to ELIAS Work Package 2, related to tools for online democracy.

Main activities

• System design and development
• Participating to research activities, including (co) supervision of students that collaborate on the project
• Representing the team in project meetings

Skills

• Strong system development skills, established by prior achievements
• Very good knowledge of core large‑scale data management principles and tools
• Good knowledge and capacity to learn more about Neural Network methods that may help our work
• Relational skills: Clear, structured, and effective communication, written and oral
• Other valued qualities: Initiative

Benefits package

• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking (after 6 months of employment) and flexible organization of working hours
• Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training
• Social security coverage

Remuneration

Remuneration in regards to work experience.

• Theme/Domain : Data and Knowledge Representation and Processing Information system (BAP E)

About Inria

Inria is the French national research institute dedicated to digital science and technology. It employs 2,600 people. Its 200 agile project teams, generally run jointly with academic partners, include more than 3,500 scientists and engineers working to meet the challenges of digital technology, often at the interface with other disciplines. The Institute also employs numerous talents in over forty different professions. 900 research support staff contribute to the preparation and development of scientific and entrepreneurial projects that have a worldwide impact.