Research Scientist, ASR

Job ID: 2011-6557
Job Location: US-CA-Palo Alto
Contact:  jian.cheng@pearsonkt.com or gwen.simpson@pearson.com

Website:  pearson.careers.com

Overview:

Pearson has one defining goal: to help people progress in their lives through learning. We champion innovation and we invest in models for education that deliver on our promise for effective, accessible, and personal learning from early literacy, college and career readiness to professional education, through data informed instruction and inventive applications for mobile and digital learning.

Pearson, the world's leading learning company, has global-reach and market leading businesses in education, business, and consumer publishing and is listed on the London and New York stock exchanges (UK: PSON; NYSE: PSO). For more information, visit www.pearson.com.

Pearson is an Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/V/D, and a member of E-Verify.

Responsible for advancing the state of the company's (www.pearsonkt.com) automated grading technology (Versant Grading System)  while working with the sales, marketing and test development teams to solve practical problems from the field. The position demands a person who has broad interests and is motivated to design and implement improvements to the company’s system. Opportunities for further research in applicable areas are available.

The day-to-day responsibilities of this role:
• The whole R&D cycle (building language models, training acoustic models, building statistical models for measuring the performance, etc.) for automated grading of different test system.
• Design new algorithms for different purpose (such as improving the grading performance).
• Do data analysis for different requirements.
• Write different scripts and tools to support the sales, marketing and test development teams.
• Maintain grading system.

Qualifications:

Personality attributes/skills required:
• Knowledge of speech recognition, probabilistic systems, statistical models.
• Strong background in statistical modeling and machine learning.
• Extensive experience programming in C/C++.
• Proficiency with SQL, Perl and Matlab.
• Demonstrate a willingness to learn and apply a wide range of technologies
• Experience with linguistic and statistical analysis of natural language would be highly desirable.
• Ph.D. or ABD (with graduation in 2011) in EE, CS or relevant areas with 0-2 yrs working experience
• Experience in designing and running ASR experiments using HTK a plus
• Strong written and verbal communication skills