Master's Studentship: Voice Computing at Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)

About the job:

The CSIR has a vacancy for a Master’s Studentship: Voice Computing in the Voice Computing Research Group within the Next Generation Enterprises and Institutions Cluster. The incumbent will be responsible for undertaking research and development in Voice Computing. This position is based in Pretoria.

Research areas:

• Text-to-speech (TTS)
• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
• Controlled Natural Language Processing (CNLP)
• Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

Key responsibilities:

• Prepare a research proposal to be approved by both the CSIR and the university;
• Prepare a written literature overview of the current state-of-the-art relevant to the research topic;
• Perform original research to solve the open research problem that the student identified in his/her proposal;
• Produce sufficient quantity and quality of peer-reviewed publications based on this research topic;
• Compile the Masters’ thesis and defend the work successfully;
• Contribute to extra activities that may be outside the scope of the masters’ research as per the needs of the research group. The amount of such work shall be limited to 20% of the total time.

Qualifications, skills and experience:

• An Honours degree in electronic/computer engineering, computer science, or computational linguistics or a related/relevant field. Students in their final year of studies will be considered and appointed upon acceptance of proof of successfully completing their degree
• All international qualifications require an evaluation report / certificate issued by the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA);
• Knowledge in speech synthesis, speech recognition, natural language processing or human computer interaction or any related machine learning background would be advantageous;
• Good programming skills in related software development, preferably Python/C/Java;
• Knowledge of open-source development tools and an understanding of the Linux OS would be advantageous;
• Good communication skills (verbal and written) and ability to interact efficiently with diverse teams of people;
• Strong analytical skills including good mathematical and statistical ability.
• All international qualifications require an evaluation report / certificate issued by the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA).