Research Assistant in Multimodal AI for Biodiversity Monitoring (INTERNAL)

School of Engineering \& Physical Sciences Location: Lincoln Salary: From £33,002 per annum Please note, this post is fixed-term and full time for 2 months. Closing Date: Wednesday 09 September 2026 Interview Date: Monday 21 September 2026 Reference: CHS360 Join the Applied Vision and Artificial Intelligence Lab (AVAIL) at the University of Lincoln to help develop HabiBench, the UK's first fully open multimodal benchmark for automated terrestrial habitat assessment. Funded by the EPSRC UK Open Multimodal AI Network (UKOMAIN) through its Open Multimodal AI Benchmark (OMAIB) programme, HabiBench builds on the team's NERC-funded AI-Hab research. It will combine ground-level habitat photographs, satellite-derived geospatial representations and ecological descriptions into a high-quality open dataset supporting biodiversity monitoring, Biodiversity Net Gain and land-use decision-making. As Research Assistant, you will help design and implement the automated data-construction pipeline; curate and quality-assure ecological and geospatial datasets; contribute to baseline multimodal AI models, evaluation and benchmarking; and prepare open releases through GitHub, Hugging Face and Zenodo. You will work with researchers and partners including the University of Sheffield, the UK Centre for Ecology \& Hydrology (UKCEH) and Mozaic Earth. You should have an honours degree (2:1 or above) and/or a master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science or a closely related subject, with good Python skills and experience of machine-learning or data-processing workflows such as PyTorch or Pandas. Experience handling and curating datasets and an interest in collaborative, interdisciplinary AI research are essential. Experience in computer vision, large language models, foundation models, geospatial machine learning, benchmarking, reproducible or open research, or biodiversity and environmental AI would be advantageous. Familiarity with Git/GitHub and AI coding assistants would also be useful. This is a full-time, fixed-term Grade 6 post for two months, based at Brayford Campus, Lincoln, with hybrid/remote working arrangements considered subject to project needs. For an informal discussion, please contact Dr Hongrui Shi at hshi@lincoln.ac.uk.