Cognitive Modeling Scientist

Honda Research Institute USA (HRI-US) in San Jose, California, is seeking a research scientist to work on developing human-aware mobility systems for the next generation of mobility. Human-aware automation requires an understanding of human behavior in response to automation actions. The research focuses on understanding and modeling users’ social and behavioral interactions with other road users and mobility AI systems. This position involves working with user study data to develop behavior models of humans with consideration of social norms in mobility. This should allow optimizing system design variables and improve overall performance. The ideal candidate will have a strong social psychology background and experience in applied statistics.

• Conduct empirical studies and experiments to understand how people perceive, remember, think about, and attend to other people in social interactions based on behavioral psychology.

• Analyze user study data to understand human behavior in future mobility interactions and develop operational frameworks to learn, sense, adapt, and influence social norms.

• Develop computational models of human social cognition to infer and predict human behavior during mobility interactions.

• Support the design, development, and integration of software systems and architectures necessary to realize research prototypes.

• Contribute to a portfolio of patents, academic publications, and prototypes to demonstrate research value.

• Ph.D. or equivalent degree in Psychology, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Human-Computer Interaction, or related field.

• Strong background and experience with designing experiments that capture social-human interaction relationships based on behavioral psychology.

• Familiarity with developing computational probabilistic models for human behavior.

• Experience with languages used for data manipulation/computational statistics (e.g., Python, R, MATLAB, C++, Java, Go).

• Experience in applied statistics i.e., probabilistic models and Bayesian models, machine/deep learning, reinforcement learning, and human-in-the-loop online learning.

cognitive modeling, behavior psychology, social interactions, human behavior model, applied statistics