Assistant Research Engineer (till 30 June 2025), Centre for Computational Law

Job Description

Work done will be at the direction of the PI, and where relevant, the Industry Director and Centre Director.As the Programme is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary by nature, you will be expected to convey yourdomain expertise and edify others (and vice versa) in as productive, constructive, and collaborative a manner as possible.

You may be asked to participate in the development of use cases and delivery of proof-of-concept prototypesfor government and industry partners in the areas of computable contracts and rules as code. Experience inrequirements analysis and agile, iterative methodologies will be useful at this stage.The work of the team will be largely determined by these use cases and customers. We will work with multipleuse cases so that we can abstract across them and develop generalized, reusable infrastructure. We will workwith specific customers so we can build useful applications on top of that infrastructure.You will contribute to the design and development of open-source software written to serve those use cases.You will work as part of a team of research engineers, developers, and domain expertise and you will beexpected to actively participate in team meetings and text-based communications. You will be expected to beactive members of the applied research community, by validating and contributing to advances incomputational law.

You may be asked to conduct use-inspired research at the direction of the Principal Investigator. This includes

• reading academic papers, standards publications, and related material such as blog posts and presentations
• coming up to speed in fields which may be new to you, such as computational linguistics, mathematical logic, programming language design, formal verification, and model-based architecture
• reading (and updating/commenting, relevant) existing software documentation
• creating presentations, video recordings, walkthroughs, etc. to document and explain research work done
• writing (and presenting, if so decided by the PI) academic papers and materials for publication and
• documenting in a sufficiently-detailed manner so as to share what you've learned.

You will be expected to participate in software development this includes

• learning how to use third party tools, including editors, IDEs, databases, business process modeling software, programming languages, and libraries
• evaluating competing software systems for suitability
• building infrastructure to enable application development
• managing yourself, and managing fellow team members
• engaging in product, project, and program management as needed
• reading books and consuming such other media forms about software development
• writing documentation such as user/developer-facing manuals, tutorials
• delivering community support to users and customers
• preparing presentations to represent the project before external audiences and
• writing actual user-facing applications throughout the full stack, in each case, documenting, reporting, and/or presenting the same in clearly and efficiently, both internally and externally.

Qualifications

Researchers under the Programme should possess both mastery of their academic speciality, and demonstrated practical experience producing and supporting high-quality open-source code throughcommunity engagement across multiple media. Candidates must have Bachelor's, Master's, Ph.D., or alternative qualifications in computer science, software engineering, (symbolic) artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, or formal methods.

Fluency in multiple natural languages, and any experience with law, are a plus.

Minimum qualifications:

Open-Source Software & Open-Standard Infrastructure EngineeringInternet Unix TCP/IP HTTP(S) XML JSON Schemas YAML Git Github TechnicalWriting Developer Relations and Evangelism

Parsers, Compilers, and Programming Language TheoryLex/YACC alex/happy Bison CFGs EBNF BNFC

App DevelopmentTest-Driven Development Continuous Integration Software Project Management Agile / XP / Scrum PairProgramming Literate Programming Unit Testing Amazon Web Services Docker Full-StackDevelopment

Programming Languages and Frameworks:Preferred: Haskell or OCaml. Python.Possible alternatives: Common Lisp Racket Scheme Javascript / Typescript / Node.

Computational Linguistics - Natural Language GenerationComputational Semantics (in Haskell, Prolog, or Lisp) Montague Semantics Grammatical Framework Textplanning Surface realizationFamiliarity with: WordNet FrameNet SenseNet Controlled Natural Languages Attempto ControlledEnglish ACErules

Formal Verification and Specification LanguagesSome familiarity with any of: TLA+ Alloy IVy B Method Z notation VDM++ LTL

Preferred qualifications:

Theorem Proving and Strongly Typed Languages:CoQ Agda Idris Lean Prover F. Advanced Haskell (Templateetc) OCaml Elm Isabelle/HOL StrangeLoop Pony

Model Checkers and SAT/SMT solvers: Z3 PAT SMTlib NuSMV SPIN Sentient

IDEs, Language Workbenches, and PLT frameworks: K Framework JetBrains MPS IDEs (Vim, Emacs,Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime Text) Language Server ProtocolRule Systems and Logics

Formalization of Contracts, Rules, and Business Logic: Akoma Ntoso LegalRuleML PetriNets Drools iLog OPA Neota Logic Constraint Handling Rules ICAIL JURIX RuleML+RR

Model Driven Architecture: UML BPMN DMN OCL SBVR Statecharts Activity Diagrams ParnasTables

Logics: Hoare Logic Kripke structures Modal mu-calculus Dynamic Logic Deontic, Temporal, andEpistemic modals Situation Calculus Process Calculi Multivalent logics Defeasible Logic BDI AbductiveLogic F-Logic Intuitionistic Non-monotonic Logics Skolemization Well-Founded SemanticsGood Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Web

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Lisp Prolog F-Logic Flora-2 Datalog Answer-SetProgramming Defeasible Logic Expert Systems DocAssemble lps.doc.ic.ac.uk

Semantic Web and Ontologies:RDFa RDFt RDF RIF SWRL OWL Cyc KBpedia SUMO UFO Protg

Work done will be at the direction of the PI, and where relevant, the Industry Director and Centre Director.As the Programme is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary by nature, you will be expected to convey yourdomain expertise and edify others (and vice versa) in as productive, constructive, and collaborative a manner as possible.

You may be asked to participate in the development of use cases and delivery of proof-of-concept prototypesfor government and industry partners in the areas of computable contracts and rules as code. Experience inrequirements analysis and agile, iterative methodologies will be useful at this stage.The work of the team will be largely determined by these use cases and customers. We will work with multipleuse cases so that we can abstract across them and develop generalized, reusable infrastructure. We will workwith specific customers so we can build useful applications on top of that infrastructure.You will contribute to the design and development of open-source software written to serve those use cases.You will work as part of a team of research engineers, developers, and domain expertise and you will beexpected to actively participate in team meetings and text-based communications. You will be expected to beactive members of the applied research community, by validating and contributing to advances incomputational law.

You may be asked to conduct use-inspired research at the direction of the Principal Investigator. This includes

• reading academic papers, standards publications, and related material such as blog posts and presentations
• coming up to speed in fields which may be new to you, such as computational linguistics, mathematical logic, programming language design, formal verification, and model-based architecture
• reading (and updating/commenting, relevant) existing software documentation
• creating presentations, video recordings, walkthroughs, etc. to document and explain research work done
• writing (and presenting, if so decided by the PI) academic papers and materials for publication and
• documenting in a sufficiently-detailed manner so as to share what you've learned.

You will be expected to participate in software development this includes

• learning how to use third party tools, including editors, IDEs, databases, business process modeling software, programming languages, and libraries
• evaluating competing software systems for suitability
• building infrastructure to enable application development
• managing yourself, and managing fellow team members
• engaging in product, project, and program management as needed
• reading books and consuming such other media forms about software development
• writing documentation such as user/developer-facing manuals, tutorials
• delivering community support to users and customers
• preparing presentations to represent the project before external audiences and
• writing actual user-facing applications throughout the full stack, in each case, documenting, reporting, and/or presenting the same in clearly and efficiently, both internally and externally.