OPPORTUNITIES

Below are current job opportunities within the Indigenous Futures Research Centre and its affiliates.

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR – EMERGING AI TECHNOLOGIES 

Application deadline: Will close when the position is filled 
Start date: ASAP. Contract is for 1 year, with the possibility of renewal up to 2 years. 
Salary:  $150K range per annum  
Hours per week: 40 hours/week 
Location: In-person based at the PI’s research studio at Concordia University in Montreal (Sir George Williams Campus). 

About Abundant Intelligences 

Why We Do It 
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a socio-technological challenge like none we’ve faced since the invention of the internet. AI is increasingly a part of our work, private lives, academic, and civil institutions. Yet the ethical underpinnings of AI remain shaky at best, ethically questionable at worst. The time is now to make major, structural changes in how it is conceptualized, designed, developed, and deployed. The question Abundant Intelligences asks is: “How do we innovate with AI in ways that are responsive to the needs and desires of many different groups—starting with Indigenous communities?” We are answering that question through cultural protocol, scientific exploration, engineering experimentation, and creative imaginings. 

Why We’re the Team 
The Abundant Intelligences team is a global, Indigenous-led, radically interdisciplinary, and community-grounded research group dedicated to understanding how we can integrate Indigenous Knowledges with AI for the good of all. We are the people who wrote the award-winning “Making Kin with the Machines” and created the ground-breaking Indigenous Protocol and AI Position Paper, and this is our next adventure.  

Why You Should Join Us 
This role will work across the global network to identify and prototype designs, processes, and systems for re-imagining AI through Indigenous lenses. Informing the work of Abundant Intelligences from a Technology perspective will require a person with a service mentality, willing to support research design needs and develop systems within a complex organizational-community oriented ecosystem. 

The Perks 

  • International network of Indigenous and AI leaders 

  • Partners include Mila, one of the largest AI research centers in the world where the Scientific Director, Dr. Yoshua Bengio, is a co-investigator on Abundant Intelligences 

  • Travel with the Abundant Intelligences team to work with Partners in North America, the Pacific, and New Zealand 

  • Mentor graduate and undergraduate students, as well as community-based learners 

  • Publish and speak on innovative, socially constructive technologies 

  • Work life balance (like for real, we actually have it) 

  • Vibrant lab atmosphere 

  • Summer Fridays  

  • Montreal rated one of the best cities in the world 

A day in the life of the Associate Director, Emerging AI Technologies 
You start your day with your weekly check in with the Indigenous Futures Research Center staff to maintain in-lab deployed storage and compute resources for AbInt post-doctoral researchers designing AI/ML for AbInt researchers. You hop on a zoom call with AbInt leadership to discuss the cyberinfrastructure needs to support summer AI institutes with Montreal-based AI research partners IVADO, Mila, and UNIQUE. You and the AbInt team walk over to the Speculative Life Research Cluster in the Milieux Institute for Art, Culture, and Technology to meet with students of their Generative AI lab and advise on maintaining that space using infrastructure as code, configuration management, and container orchestration tools. 

After lunch join the Technical and Creation WG which you chair to connect with technologists and artists across the globe to discuss how to coordinate data governance through a data mesh infrastructure you are developing to interact with the research cyberinfrastructure of each Abundant Intelligences Pod (research cluster) as well as create cross-network connectivity that respects Indigenous Data Sovereignty. End your day with the student-led website team who are designing web-based data visualizations of the Abundant Intelligences connections and partnerships across disciplines and geographies. Then head to an opening of a show by Skawenatti, co-Director of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), of which Abundant Intelligences is a sister-program to, where she and her team are debuting a Mohawk creation story created in Second Life.  

About the Position 

The Associate Director in Emerging AI Technologies will have two main responsibilities. The first is to provide expert technical guidance on emerging AI technologies to the Abundant Intelligences research leadership team as well as to the program’s research partners. This includes contributing to collaborative research efforts, and assisting the program in maintaining high standards of excellence. The second is to supervise the team maintaining the technical infrastructure for the research lab that is home to AbInt, AbTeC, and the IFRC.