Assistant engineer for a sociological research on labour and AI (M/F)

Job Description

Missions

The engineer contributes to an ongoing research programme on data workers who help to develop artificial intelligence (AI) by carrying out support tasks such as annotation. This work is often precarious and outsourced to low-income countries. To shed light on it, this study combines socio-economic analyses with advances in the linguistics of large spoken corpora and its potential to reshape the methods and tools of speech technology and machine learning. We aim to harness the richness of spoken data, particularly interviews, by going beyond the identification of key themes and taking into account a wider range of signals – from regional accents and disfluencies to tone of voice and word choice. Computer-assisted linguistic analysis provides the techniques needed to capture these characteristics.

Activity

The successful candidate will assist the project team in: 1/ conducting interviews with workers from Portuguese- and/or Spanish-speaking countries; 2/ checking and, where necessary, correcting the automatic transcripts of these interviews; 3/ organising project team meetings and coordinating participation in a conference. The engineer will have the opportunity to join a consortium of highly motivated scientists, based mainly in France but with partners abroad.

Your Profil

Skills

- Organisational and interpersonal skills are required, including the ability to collaborate effectively with diverse groups.
- A basic understanding of sociological theory is essential. Specialisations in organisational sociology, sociology of work and employment, digital sociology, economic sociology, digital sociology and related fields are particularly welcome.
- Experience of fieldwork including interviews is essential.
- Ability to work in an interdisciplinary setting involving sociologists, linguists and computer scientists from both academia and industry is essential.
- Ability to work in an international setting, involving collaboration with partners abroad, is essential.
- At least basic knowledge of AI, machine learning, digital labour and/or the platform economy (also known as the 'gig economy') is desirable.
- Fluency in written and spoken English is highly valued.
- Fluency in Portuguese and/or Spanish, both written and spoken, is essential.
- Fluency in French is a plus, but not required.

Your Work Environment

The post will be based at CREST (Center for Research in Economics and Statistics), at ENSAE Paris, located on the campus of Institut Polytechnique de Paris in Palaiseau. The CREST is a major laboratory for quantitative economic and social sciences, which includes a computational social sciences unit focused on digital technologies and AI in the social sciences. The engineer's work forms part of the VOLI project ("Voices from Online Labour : Inequalities in digital earning activities across countries"), funded by the ANR for the period 2024–28. VOLI innovatively combines hypotheses and methods from sociology, large-scale corpus linguistics and speech/AI technology to address emerging economic and societal risks centred on the link between online platform work, automation and social inequalities. In addition to CREST, VOLI's partners are the Social and Economic Sciences (SES) Department of Telecom Paris; LISN (Laboratoire interdisciplinaire des sciences du numérique), at Université Paris-Saclay; CRISCO (Centre de recherches inter-langues sur la signification en COntexte) at Université de Caen Normandie. Another partner is Vocapia Research, an R&D company and software producer specialising in speech technology. There are also international partners in Argentina, Brazil, Germany and Spain.

Compensation and benefits

Compensation

About 2571,89 euros gross per month

Annual leave and RTT

44 jours

Remote Working practice and compensation

Pratique et indemnisation du TT

Transport

Prise en charge à 75% du coût et forfait mobilité durable jusqu’à 300€

About the offer

About the CNRS

The CNRS is a major player in fundamental research on a global scale. The CNRS is the only French organization active in all scientific fields. Its unique position as a multi-specialist allows it to bring together different disciplines to address the most important challenges of the contemporary world, in connection with the actors of change.

CNRS

The research professions