Help Desk Technician

This position is a part of the Non-Academic Staff Association (NASA).

This position has an end date of March 31st, 2023.

Work Hours: This role will work an average of 12 hours/week and will fluctuate week to week.

Location: This role is hybrid with a mix of remote and in-person work. 

Working for the University of Alberta

The University of Alberta acknowledges that we are located on Treaty 6 territory, and respects the histories, languages and cultures of First Nations, Métis, Inuit and all First Peoples of Canada, whose presence continues to enrich our vibrant community.

The University of Alberta is teeming with change makers, community builders, and world shapers who lead with purpose each and every day. We are home to more than 40,000 students in 200+ undergraduate and 500+ graduate programs, over 13,000 faculty and staff, 260,000 alumni worldwide and have been recognized as one of Canada’s Greenest Employers for over a decade.

Your work will have a meaningful influence on a fascinating cross section of people—from our students and stakeholders, to our renowned researchers and innovators who are quite literally curing diseases, making discoveries and generating solutions that make the world healthier, safer, stronger, and more just.

Position Summary

Our team (Precision Health and AI4Society) is creating an “AI4Health Helpdesk Technician”, to help clinicians, health researchers, and other clients, who are actively working on health tasks that could use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques, to produce models that can be used effectively for making decisions. We anticipate these clients will be comfortable programming, and know the basic ideas of BioStatistics and Supervised Machine Learning (eg, having taken a MOOC in this topic). Typically, they will have already implemented a prototype learning system, and have some preliminary results, but have reached an impasse and need advice. We are seeking a Help Desk Technician to run this helpdesk – basically to answer specific questions from clients about some Machine Learning aspect of their application.

The ideal candidate is a current (or former) grad student, who has wide knowledge of machine learning – including supervised learning and reinforcement learning, and better, also artificial intelligence in general, probabilistic modeling, imaging, natural language processing, etc. An additional strength will be the candidate’s familiarity with the relevant AI/ML researchers on campus, including those listed in https://forum.ai4society.ca/index.php/AI4Society:ALL_Member . We anticipate that the Help Desk Technician will work part-time – averaging 12 hours per week. The position will initially be for 6 months with the possibility of an extension.

Duties

• Respond to clients by addressing their questions, which can range from describing basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, to addressing specific nuances of the client’s application.
• Each such interaction may involve going through detailed example of the behavior of the client’s implementation 
• This might involve a high-level code review
• This interaction may involve several sessions with a specific client, to identify the particular issues
• The technician needs to keep records of these communications, and maintain contact with the client as needed
• Technician should also verify that his/her response adequately addressed the client’s concerns and whether this perhaps led to other topics/issues
• The technician’s answers may involve:
• short presentations that describe the issues and standard responses .. including (but not restricted to):
• Overfitting – cross-validation 
• Feature selection
• Evaluation measures – beyond Accuracy and AUROC
• pointers to relevant educational resources (websites, MOOCs, articles), 
• pointers to technical repositories (eg, Github repositories)
• development of specific new resources
• escalating this query to others (eg, RG)
• Logging the interactions 
• If seeing many similar questions, perhaps adding this to an emerging ReadMe / FAQ
• If the query is in some AI-related area unfamiliar to the technician (eg, imaging or natural language), the technician might need to read-up on this, or point to another resource more familiar with this area.
• Keep up-to-date with recent developments, as much as possible
• Maintain own schedule, coordinating multiple clients as necessary

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in a related field (e.g. Computing Science) is required. Master's degree, with involvement in an AI research project, is preferred.
• The successful candidate must have experience with AI projects
• Understanding the core topics of AI and especially Machine Learning (including Supervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning)
• Knowledge of other areas of AI (such as Imaging, Natural Language, Search, Probabilistic Graphical Model) is preferred
• Demonstrated programming skills, especially in Python, R
• Demonstrated analytical and diagnostic skills
• Ability to solve problems effectively
• Excellent customer service skills
• Ability to interact with people in general, and especially with people who are NOT in IT (and not machine learning, nor computing science)
• Excellent communication skills (both oral and written),
• Excellent problem solving, analytical, and time management skills
• Including ability to manage multiple priorities
• Empathetic and intuitive listening skills
• Be able to deal with change and ambiguity
• Ability to converse in multiple languages would be an asset

Note: Online applications are accepted until midnight Mountain Standard Time of the closing date.

We thank all applicants for their interest; however, only those individuals selected for an interview will be contacted.