Research App Developer

Job description

Position Type:

Permanent Staff (EHRA NF)

Sch of Inform and Libr Science-370101

Research App Developer

EHRA Non-Faculty

Information Technology

$51,500 - $84,176

Full-Time Permanent

40

NF0004620

20037337

11/03/2020

12/03/2020

No

01/04/2021

PRIMARY PURPOSE OF ORGANIZATIONAL UNIT:
The School of Information and Library Science (SILS) seeks to advance the profession and practice of librarianship and information science; to prepare students for careers in the field of information and library science; and to make significant contributions to the study of information. Faculty members further these goals by teaching and advisory work; by research and scholarly publishing; and by service to the School, the university, the state, and the professional community.

Located in SILS, the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) is an interdisciplinary center that brings together principal investigators from SILS, the Hussman School of Journalism and Media (Hussman), and the College of Arts and Science’s Department of Communication to address the roles mediated information plays in globally connected, digitally-mediated social systems. CITAP’s research team of faculty, postdoctoral researchers, visiting faculty, and graduate and undergraduate students research questions of relevance to information quality, with a particular focus on algorithms, misinformation, polarization, propaganda, and political institutions. CITAP also works closely with the School of Law and the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy and is committed to making research and data publicly available to inform technological development, journalistic best practices, and policymaking.

POSITION SUMMARY:
The Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seeks to hire a full-time programmer with expertise in machine learning, information extraction, Natural Language Processing (NLP), computer vision, mobile app development, and/or related areas. The successful applicant will report to CITAP’s principal investigator, Dr. Deen Freelon, Hussman Associate Professor. CITAP is interested in measuring user activity on the internet. This is a difficult problem for multiple reasons, including the fact that many people use more than one device and that most non-browser apps offer no means to collect user-facing data. This position will develop a next-generation media monitoring system that can capture data on research participants’ public-facing internet activity for scholarly analysis with as many of the following capabilities as possible:

-Captures and links data on internet consumption from individual users’ mobile and desktop devices
-Captures data from apps (not just browser content)
-Performs named-entity recognition for both text and images
-Automatically classifies content according to a broad, preset typology (e.g. news, entertainment, journalism, education, health, etc.)
-Excludes private content such as protected health information (PHI) and personal financial data
-Saves all data remotely to a cloud server
-Does all of this periodically (e.g. every five minutes) for ~500-600 users

This is the sole IT position in the Center with meaningful impact on Center reporting and research beyond the scope of a typical IT Professional. This position is contingent on CITAP research funds. The current funding for the Center is 5 years.

Master’s or Bachelors and 0-2 years’ experience or will accept a combination of related education and experience in substitution.

Minimum: at least two years of experience in app development, NLP, computer vision, machine learning, information extraction, or other relevant areas; or an equivalent combination of education and experience.

Preferred:
- Master’s or Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, Computer Engineering, or closely related degree from an appropriately accredited institution is preferred.
- Experience (in the form of available software) with app development for data collection
- Experience writing software in university or academic environments
- Experience using machine learning to categorize text captured from the web
- Experience capturing data from mobile devices with user consent
- Experience conducting named-entity recognition on both textual and image data
- Experience preprocessing, storing, and retrieving metadata generated from scraped web data
- Experience successfully planning, deploying, and supporting software projects on a solo basis

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or status as a protected veteran.

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