Research Scientist – AI for Collective State Sensing

About the role

Honda Research Institute USA is seeking a Research Scientist to advance AI methods that sense, model, and interpret collective states and behaviors in human‑human, human‑AI, and AI‑mediated interactions. The role combines fundamental research with prototype development to create systems that understand group dynamics in real‑world multimodal environments.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement AI models that infer group‑level behavior from noisy, sparse multimodal data (vision, audio, language, interaction traces, contextual signals).
• Develop robust learning techniques for uncertain and temporally dynamic human behavioral signals.
• Model social roles, norms, relationships, coordination, trust, affect, and emergent group patterns.
• Advance multimodal representation learning, graph/relational learning, temporal modeling, foundation models, probabilistic reasoning, causal inference, and interpretable AI.
• Create evaluation benchmarks, annotation protocols, and experimental designs for collective behavior models.
• Translate research outcomes into proof‑of‑concept prototypes and internal demonstrations.
• Collaborate with interdisciplinary teams across AI, cognitive science, social behavior modeling, robotics, and human‑AI interaction.
• Publish in top conferences/journals, contribute to intellectual property, and support long‑term research strategy.

Required profile

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI, or a closely related field.
• Strong publication record in reputable AI/ML, multimodal learning, social signal processing, or human‑AI interaction venues.
• Demonstrated experience handling multimodal human data under noisy or imperfect conditions.
• Ability to formulate open research problems and deliver functional prototypes.

Required skills

• Multimodal learning
• Graph and relational learning
• Temporal modeling
• Foundation models
• Probabilistic reasoning
• Causal inference
• Interpretable AI