Postdoctoral Researcher in Speech and Language Technology

About the role

Aalto University is looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher to join the funded project COWAMA: Content-based watermarking for AI-generated audio, led by Assistant Professor Lauri Juvela. The project develops watermarking methods and software for speech and audio generative models, with a focus on robustness and suitability for open-source use. The research takes place at the Department of Information and Communications Engineering (DICE) in Espoo, Finland.

Key responsibilities

• Develop new content-based audio watermarking methods for generated speech, music and audio.
• Design detection and perceptual quality measures for audio that deviates from its reference content but remains perceptually acceptable.
• Explore methods such as audio content detection, music information retrieval, audio fingerprinting, alignment search, feature matching in self-supervised audio representations and reference-free audio quality prediction.
• Integrate watermarking into deep audio generative models, including extensions of collaborative watermarking to diffusion models and audio language models based on neural audio codecs.
• Study embedding watermark information in long-term content such as speech semantics, duration, prosody or emphasis.
• Develop robustness evaluation methods, differentiable augmentation tools and realistic attack scenarios.
• Publish in leading journals and conferences and contribute to open-source software, models and reproducible research.

Required profile

• Doctoral degree, or close to completing it, in speech or audio processing, machine learning, signal processing, computer science or a related field.
• Strong experience with deep learning and generative models.
• Interest in one or more of: speech synthesis, music generation, neural audio codecs, diffusion models, audio language models, watermarking, deepfake detection, audio quality assessment or audio representation learning.
• Ability to conduct independent research and publish in high-quality peer-reviewed venues.
• Good collaboration and communication skills in an international setting; fluency in English is required, Finnish is not.
• Supervision experience at doctoral or master's level is an advantage.

Required skills

• Programming suitable for modern machine learning research, preferably Python and deep learning frameworks.
• Running deep learning experiments on high-performance computing infrastructure.

What we offer

• Starting salary of 4,220 EUR per month, increasing with performance; fixed-term contract of 2 years, possibly extendable to 4 years.
• Access to computing infrastructure including Aalto's CPU/GPU clusters, CSC and LUMI, and the Aalto Acoustics Lab.
• Open science support, including open-access publishing and open-source releases.
• Professional development opportunities and a hybrid working model with the main workplace at the Otaniemi Campus.